Road Trip: 10 Cities in 14 Days: 3

DAY 3 : Mark Twain's Hannibal

(If you missed our start, you can find day 1 and 2 HERE)

Technically, we were straying off the Route 66 grid but as Sarah Kendzior notes in The Last American Road Trip, "Route 66 beckons you to the freedom of the open road, but the open road keeps terminating without warning," and English majors are not going to miss Hannibal just to stay on the road.

We arrived at the Mark Twain Cave tour site along with about 5,000 grade schoolers whose teachers were just trying to make it to the end of the year as the Springfield teachers were. Fortunately for us, they had their tours and we had ours,

filled with Tom Sawyer allusions, bad puns, and a good walk. One of our cave mates chose to make a nasty political remark about Nancy Pelosi , amazingly the only one I heard the whole trip. We've been to Twain's Connecticut house and we've both taught Huck Finn, and the cave tour

For decades, signing the walls was permitted. No longer.

Our guide- It was dark in there

and the riverboat trip, which we took next, really rounded out our Twain education. There we heard Twain tales and myths, and the regional myths like the one at Lovers' Leap, about which Twain had said, "There are fifty Lovers' Leaps along the Mississippi from whose summit disappointed Indians girls have jumped." We passed the island where Tom and Huck hid out playing pirates. We saw a lot of storage vessels. It was a gorgeous day.

After the ride, we walked the boardwalk, with its benches, dedicated by the locals

My fav

We had coffee at the Chocolaterie Stam with its friendly chatty owner, Michelle.
One of his favorite vegetables is chocolate

Shop owner Michelle makes a mean pot of coffee,
strong enough for us, and has beautiful chocolate.

As always, we walked the town. We saw Beck Thatcher's house and all the other tourist attractions...

... including the wall you can whitewash. AND near that wall, I saw another wall covered with a sign for a pet groomer whose logo is a Scottie and a Westie, Groomingdale's. We stopped near closing when people were picking up their clean dogs, and I bought my first (but not the last) T-shirt of the trip.

Love the color, too!

Michelle had suggested the Brick Oven for supper, which we could walk to rather than the place I had researched that we would have to drive to, and it was a very good choice. The owner was onsite, and she was terrific, as was the food. Italian, my fav.

The Brick Oven

We really had made the most of our day in Twain country as we headed back to our Best Western, a sort of old fashioned place with a swimming pool in the middle of the lobby. Still, it was a quiet night in the place, and at a meat-laden breakfast the next morning (I will never understand sausage gravy on biscuits) and a great guy from Denver at our table who is as worried about our country as we are. Nothing like starting your day back onto route 66 thinking about what a wreck we are in.

"Route 66 is America, and America is falling apart." -- Kendzior

Road Trip: 10 Cities in 14 Days: 1 & 2

Get your kicks on Route 66

DAY 1 & 2 : Route 66
Lincoln and Springfield

In April, I introduced this trip here.

Route 66 starts in downtown Chicago. We planned to pick it up outside the city.

We dropped Rennie and Rebus off with Martini & Teddy, their favorite Westies, all four running like demons ("Bye! Don't come back too soon!") and were on the road by 9:00 a.m., eating orange scones and coffee, heading on I-70 to Indiana and beyond to get onto route 66, singing "You go to St. Louie and Joplin, Missouri..." little did we know what Joplin would hold for us.

"I am a sucker for any song that name-checks American towns regardless of whether it is logical or good. It is debatable whether 'Route 66' is either, but we belt it out every time."

--Sarah Kendzior

But first, the only town to name itself after Abraham Lincoln while he was still alive: LINCOLN, ILLLINOIS.

Day 1 Lincoln, Illinois! A political star arose!

"I will prepare, and some day my chance will come."-- Abraham Lincoln, starting out

Postville

Lincoln rallying the people

The Old State Capitol

We arrived to see Postville, a replica of where Lincoln practiced and the famous watermelon monument, denoting the place where Lincoln served watermelon to the town when they named it after him. (I did not ask Paul to pose eating a fake watermelon. His idea.) A Korean War monument. We had planned to visit the Lincoln College's museum on Lincoln, but found it shuttered since 2022. It had its highest enrollment ever in 2019-- and then Covid. No word on what happens to the museum. We visited the train depot, still active with both passenger and freight trains, and then the Old State Capitol (not a replica) where Lincoln rallied people in his run for Senate.

We picked up cold food at Aldi's and ate in our room at the Hampton Inn-Lincoln, which was nice and a lot cheaper than Springfield hotels, and little did we know, a lot better for our health.

Day 2 Springfield, Illinois: I turned 75 today!

Back on route 66, we have a short drive to Springfield and after a short walk around town, went first to the Lincoln Museum, where we watched a movie, "In His Eyes" with a lot of strobing and exploding that kept kids in the audience interested. But we were most interested of a map titled "The Civil War in Four Minutes," where we watched how the battles moved and the number of soldiers died in speeded up time. We watched it over and over. War in four minutes.

By Amos Oliver Doyle - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him. -- Abraham Lincoln

From there, we went to the Presidential Library with two exhibits of interest to me: Special letters , which I loved, since letters and diaries were really the first writing I ever did. And then The Stevenson Room, on behalf of my maternal grandparents who loved Stevenson and voted for him twice and felt his loss was due to the fact that he was too intelligent for the American people. I bought a whole lot of tchotchkes I didn't need in the gift shop, blueberry gummies and blueberry tincture and magnets and a
book bag and postcards.

It was that time of year when teachers are trying to keep instructing their students and students are going nuts with the end of the year in sight, and that day the lesson for grade schoolers was LINCOLN, and the nearby playground and train station and shelter were mobbed with kids scooping up the stacks of bag lunches. It reminded me of my first grade field trip from Whipple Grade School: a train ride! My mom, the train engineer's daughter was so happy, and so was I. So were these kids.

On and off all day, it rained, but we walked the streets anyhow, found a sweet Obama site. We tried to visit the Frank Lloyd Wright Dana House, but it was shuttered tight, despite the fact that every/thing/one (including the Lincoln Library) saying it was open. If I had only known-- how did I not know??-- we could have seen Vachel Lindsay's house, I would have made reservations there.

This being my birthday (Paul's is coming up in 4 days), we made a reservation for the historic Maldaner's restaurant downtown. Neither the one vegetarian dish posted online or a different one posted in the window was available, so Paul had to pay for a plate of scallops on risotto, hold the scallops. I had duck which was good, but I wondered if it was undercooked because I threw it up (vigorously) in the middle of the night. Or it might have been our waiter, who seemed not to like us. (He even corrected my Spanish pronunciation as he passed by and I was speaking to Paul and not to him.)

After my midnight upheaval, I experienced an allergic reaction, which we soon realized was caused by the feather pillows, which both of us are intensely allergic to and made arrangements ahead of time not to have but in fact, did have and only discovered at 1 a.m., when we stripped the bed and slept on a towel. Paul mentioned it very quietly the next morning to the manager of the Hilton Doubletree, not even lodging a complaint or expecting any redress, but she looked horrified and apologized and returned a lot of our money. And after all, you can't keep us from having a good time. And we dress up nice, huh?

And we were back on the road for day three: Mark Twain's Hannibal!!

"Route 66 will turn 100 years old in 2026." --Sarah Kendzior

"Better see it while you can!" --Diane and Paul

DAY 3 HERE

My Dad's Scrapbook: Buchenwald

When I was a child, I was pawing through our big box of photos, usually kept in the attic, when I came across a group of photos I couldn't make sense of. More than anything, they looked like pictures of piles of rags, and I ran to my dad, saying, "Daddy, what is this?" He scooped them away from me, saying, "When you are older, I will tell you about them."

Later came when I was in fifth grade, working on my class scrapbook of "Current Events," clipping with horror the stories on the Eichmann trials. About that time I was also reading, The Diary of Anne Frank, so Dad must have felt the time had come, and he told me about what he witnessed in the camps at the end of the war.

I know many men did not talk about their war experiences, but my dad did. When so many didn't, I am not sure why he did, but I can think of some reasons. He returned to live with his very loving parents, and he returned about the same time as his brother Les who survived many horrendous battles on land, including the Battle of the Bulge. Throughout the years, his crew got together and the men stayed up late while the wives and kids went to bed, and they talked long into the night

When I was teaching College Writing I at The University of Findlay, I created a course titled "Writing About World War Two from a Personal Point of View." I had the students interview someone who was alive then. We read Terkel, we studied aspects of the war still impacting our lives, like the Demjamjuk. He spoke to my students and to my siblings' friends who were writing essays and making videos about the war.

Here is his from the scrapbook is his account, and one of those photos I came across as a child.:

When we went to the concentration camps to evacuate them, that was mind boggling. I was just a kid—I wasn’t twenty-one when I got out. I’d been through the war and ah—you know you take a kid at that age now and dump him into that sort of thing and they’d have the screamin’ meemee’s.

When we flew into Buchenwald—you could smell it in the airplane from let’s just say…miles away. You could smell decomposed flesh—just stunk to the high heavens. When they knew the Allies were coming, the Germans just ran—what they didn’t kill, they just left there: no food, no supplies. . . And [the prisoners] were afraid to leave—they didn’t know the war was over. You had to see them to…it’s mind boggling.

The first time I walked down a street in Buchenwald and I saw a trench, oh, I would say, five hundred feet long, that they had shoved out with a bulldozer, with bodies in it. I mean sixteen deep in the ditch. Dumped back in there with dump trucks and then they’d dump lime in on [the bodies]. And they started draggin’ them out instead of leavin’ them in there. And I mean, when we went in there, I mean there were bodies every place you looked—decomposed bodies.

And the people that were still alive—they were like skeletons—just bones with skin stretched over them. It was—it was a traumatic experience really. I mean I had nightmares over that for a long time.

RUSS KENDIG'S

World War II Scrapbook

Recently, I attended the 100th Bomb Groups Reunion held at the World War II Museum and laid out the scrapbook which my sister Daun had

put together in the 1990s, and many people there poured through it. Through the years, many people have perused this book, which is a terrific document, created with the neatness and flair that only

put together in the 1990s, and many people there poured through it. Through the years, many people have perused this book, which is a terrific document, created with the neatness and flair that only Daun could have achieved with Dad's many many photos, from the camera his pilot Bob Ellis gifted him and encouraged him to take photos. And take photos he did, developing them at night sitting on his cot, with his hands in a changing bag.