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