Nauvoo Trip 2024: Day 4 - Walt Disney's Hometown

After breakfast and packing up the car, we checked out of our hotel Monday morning and then headed towards Nauvoo by way of Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline.  

It took us a couple hours to get there from Liberty.  We started off at the visitor's center.  Unfortunately, it was closed.  They are always closed on Mondays, so we couldn't get in the building, but a lady who works there stopped by the center and gave us a couple maps of the town and where to go on a walking tour.  So that was very nice.  

We walked around the outside of the visitor center where we encountered a ton of crazy, loud, flying bugs called cicadas.  They are not harmful to humans, but they would fly around you and land on you, and it was super yucky.  Josh was not having it at all.  He hates bugs and did not like them flying around him and especially landing on him.  I am with Josh, yucky.

We quickly left that area and went on to explore more parts of the town.  We saw a big train by the visitor's center.  The real railroad tracks ran right behind the visitor's center and the trains came by often and were very fast and very loud.  Walt said that his love for trains came from the train tracks that were near his home in Marceline.

Then we saw the area where they used to have Autopia.  We walked the track that it used to follow.  After that we went over a bridge that took us to a park area.  

From the park we walked on Main Street USA.  All the shops were closed either because it was Monday or because it was Memorial Day.  It was disappointing that we didn't get to go into the stores and the visitors center, but it was still neat to walk around the town.  

After we saw everything in town, we drove to where the Disney farm located.  We were able to walk back through the trees and see a replica of a barn that they had back when Walt was a child.  It was interesting to see.  There were a lot of the cicada bugs, so the kids decided to just stay in the car for this part.  

It was fun to walk around the town and see some of the things that inspired Disneyland.  After we saw all the sites, we stopped for a bathroom break at a gas station and then drove the rest of the way to our hotel outside of Nauvoo in Keokuk, Iowa.