Driving the Lincoln Highway in Illinois.
Continuing my late summer mini-Lincoln Highway trip I crossed over to Illinois from Dyer IN (first picture) and immediately got off busier US 30 and took the Sauk Trail road which is the original Lincoln Highway routing to Chicago Heights (where the Lincoln Highway and the Dixie Highway meet).
I have to say, it’s a lovely drive along the Lincoln in Illinois. There are so many gems along the way in Illinois – for me the stretch of road from St Charles to Fulton was one of the finest on the midwestern portion of the Lincoln and hence so many Illinois posts.
As with Indiana it is not a great driving distance to get across the state.
A few of the cities on the old road there have their challenges – Chicago Heights, Joliet, Aurora and Sterling/Rock Falls come to mind – but for the most part it is a remarkable collection of pretty towns and cities all the way to the Iowa state line at the Mississippi River (which is a sight to behold).
As on the Lincoln in Indiana and Ohio it is mostly rural (at least after one gets away from the outskirts of Chicago).
This set of pictures shows what a lot of the drive was like. The third-to-last picture is a stretch of an unpaved portion of the original road. The very last picture was taken from Fulton, IL, looking at the Mark Morris Memorial Bridge (also called the North Bridge) where Illinois 136/Iowa 136 crosses the Mississippi into Clinton, Iowa.
