I'd take a visitor on a mini tour of the midwest. Starting with our state capitol of Springfield, Illinois http://www.visit-springfieldillinois.com/ we'd visit the State Capitol building, the Abraham Lincoln home and tomb, and of course the new Lincoln museum http://www.presidentlincoln.org/ .

Next a trip through Hannibal, Missouri http://www.hanmo.com/ to tour Mark Twain's cave, and the old downtown area with the Tom Sawyer exhibits.

A drive down along the Mississippi river would take us to St. Louis, Missouri to see the Gateway Arch http://www.gatewayarch.com/Arch/, Grant's Farm http://www.grantsfarm.com/ . A tour of the Anheuser Busch breweryhttp://www.anheuser-busch.com/ and a St. Louis Cardinal's baseball game http://stlouis.cardinals.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=stl followed by a tour of historic Cahokia Mounds http://cahokiamounds.org/ would send us back into Illinois.

We'd then travel through part of the cornbelt and some of the most fertile farm ground in the world on our way to Chicago, Illinois. Once in Chicago a trip up to the sky deck in the Sears Tower http://www.theskydeck.com/info.asp an off broadway show http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/off-...ay-in-chicago/ some shopping on the Magnificent Mile http://www.themagnificentmile.com/ lunch at Pizzaria Uno for an authentic Chicago deep dish pizza http://www.unos.com/newmenu/dd_pizza.html an afternoon at the Field Museum of Natural History http://www.fieldmuseum.org/ to see Sue the T-Rex dinosaur and finally end with a Chicago Cubs game at the historic Wrigley field http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=chc and end our trip with a walk along Lakeshore Drive and the beach.

This trip which could be enjoyed in about 4 days could easily be stretched to a week by including a few more sights such as the St. Louis Zoo, a tour of the Catepilar factory in Peoria, or the John Deere factory in Moline, Illinois, and obviously many more sights in and around Chicago.