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| Mark Twain Caves campground in Hannibal, MO |
Kansas City, KS to Hannibal, MO
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. |
| Graffiti from 1870 |
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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| We were allowed to climb around and sit down just in this one section of the cave. You can see all the smoke stains on the roof above our heads, from decades of explorers past. |
***
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.
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