This morning found us back in the water park.  I think our timing here was just right – a few hours in the park last night and a few hours this morning.  Both days, at the end of this time, I was feeling totally shriveled and ready to get out of the water, so I can’t imagine spending a whole day here.  (I should mention that the kids would strenuously disagree with this viewpoint.)  In all honesty I let Bob do the brunt of the water supervision today, while I took a shower and cleaned up the hotel room in peace.  I think I got the better end of the deal.

We arrived in Hannibal, MO in the late afternoon.  This may seem to be a rather oddball destination, but it’s the hometown of Mark Twain, the setting for Tom Sawyer, and (we’d read) a quaint old Mississippi River town.  We finished listening to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the car a couple of days ago, and we all (except maybe Lanie) had really enjoyed it.

We were staying in a campground at the Mark Twain Caves, which features tours of the cave where Tom and Becky got lost in Tom Sawyer.  The campground was nice enough – basically a large grassy field interspersed with big, old trees – but seemed oddly deserted.  (We later found that this would be the theme of everything we saw in Hannibal.)  After setting up the tent we wandered over to check out the cave tours, and were able to book one leaving fifteen minutes later — for which we were the only guests, until another family jumped in late.

We did really enjoy the cave tour, though.  Unlike the other tours we’ve done, which have highlighted the natural, untouched elements of the caves, this one had more of a historical and literary interest.  The walls of many of the passages of the cave were covered with smoke stains and names scratched in the smoke – some from the 1800s and still looking fresh and new.  You could imagine the scenes from Twain’s books, with children flocking through the caves, leaving their mark behind.  There was a room that was supposedly the hide-out for Jesse James, and a room where some creepy doctor performed experiments in trying to petrify a human body.  Plus, of course, all the stories about Tom and Becky and Injun Joe.

We later went into downtown in search of ice cream, and were able to locate Becky Thatcher’s Ice Cream Parlor and Emporium – at which we were the only customers, the whole time we were there.  (If you have ever read the Stephen King novella The Langoliers,  you have a sense of what it felt like to be in Hannibal.)  We also climbed up 244 steps to a historic (and still functioning – whether for practical or entertainment purposes, I’m not sure) lighthouse on a high bluff above the Mississippi.  Then it was back down the semi-deserted streets to sleep at our semi-deserted campground.

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From Bob:

We had a nice water-slide send off from Kansas  (Jen checked us out of our room at 11, while the rest of us frolicked in the water park until noon.  I think this is legal…)

                Then we added yet another state to our chain.  Missouri is not that much different from Kansas.  There were a lot of famous people born in each.  In Kansas we saw signs for birthplaces of Jesse James, J.C. Penney, General Pershing, Bob Dole and Arlen Spector (same town, even), Abraham Lincoln, and, I think, Eisenhower.  At least Ike’s presidential museum is there.  I don’t know if that means he was born there.

                In Missouri, we have targeted the birthplace of another famous person, Mark Twain.  It was my urging that got this place included in our itinerary, so I have to take credit for the fact that it’s a little of a disappointment.  It seems well setup for receiving tourists, and perhaps it has received a lot of tourists, but there just aren’t a lot of tourists here.  As a result, Hannibal has kind of a ghost town feel.  There are a lot of boarded up shops in antique buildings that look in danger of going extinct. 

                In this respect, Hannibal reminds me not so much of the quaint river town deep in the heart of the New West, but as a river town in southwestern Connecticut.  It was very much like Shelton, the town I grew up in, only without the Wiffleball Factory.  Take away the Wiffleball from Shelton and cover just about everything with Mark Twain and/or Tom, Becky, and Huck, and you have Hannibal, MO.   Gently receding toward their respective rivers are banks flecked with buildings that are not fancy, not well kept, or neither of the above.  There are gaps among them, in Hannibal, and several structures look like they’re ready to come down.  It’s not unlike what I remember seeing in the downtown area of the place where I grew up.  Old factories, old warehouses, old stores, a new public building or two.  The exceptions in Hannibal are the buildings dedicated to the Mark Twain tour, including the house where he spend most of his childhood, and the nice museum in a renovated multi-story stone building on Main Street.

                Granted the Mississippi is a bit more of a storied river than the Housatonic, but based on the river traffic I saw in  Hannibal today, neither river is more than a shadow of what Twain described in his writing.  Huge man-made banks line the waterfront in Hannibal, and where streets intersected these levies, large gates stood, ready to keep out flood waters.  This was a visible nod to the power of the Mississippi, but, otherwise it did not seem overwhelmingly vital to life here.  It is muddy red, though not so much as the most of the Colorado that we drove along, and it is about half again as wide as the Housy

once it meets with the Naugatuck, say where it flows behind Sunnyside School, if you’ve ever seen it from there.

                This is actually the second time we’ve crossed the Mississippi – the first being way back when we entered Iowa from Minnesota.  We had a nice view of it then from Effigy Mounds National Monument, if you remember from our blog posts of about two weeks ago. 

                I don’t remember crossing the Ohio River (it might have been in Cleveland) or the Hudson, though we must have.  We also skipped the heralded Catskill rivers by taking 80 north into Albany.  We may have even crossed the Housatonic when our trip was young and we were exiting New England through western Massachusetts.   Since we crossed, then re-met the Mississippi, though, we have come across several rivers that I knew by reputation and have been interested to see in real life.  Have I mentioned them yet? 

The Colorado, of course, helped guide us and Rt. 70 a good part of the way through the Rockies.  We also took our jet boat tour out of Moab on that river.  We might have even come across it in Utah.  We also saw a portion of the Snake River – I’d have to check the atlas to remind myself which state that was in.  There was lots of rafting action on the Snake.  The Powder River we crossed once or twice.  That river comes up a lot when you’re reading about the old west and Custer’s expeditions.  Speaking of which, we cross the Bighorn River in and amongst the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming.  We also, of course, got several nice views of the Yellowstone River, which was a hot spot for fishing when we saw it.

The most fishermen we’ve seen, however, were in the Rocky Mountain National Park.  The name of the river we hiked along has escaped me, if I ever knew it, but we saw dozens of people wading in or following the banks and casting.  It was a small river, maybe 20 feet wide at its widest point and frequently half that.  I did not see anyone catch anything on any of the rivers we’ve crossed.

More people, apparently,  are reading books about fly fishing than are reading Tom Sawyer these days. The streets of Hannibal were quiet when we ventured downtown for ice cream (at Becky Thatcher’s Ice Cream Emporium) this evening.  Tomorrow we’ll actually tour the museum and historic homes and we’ll see then if anyone is around.