This (June 12) was Mark Twain day, starting with the museum and boyhood home, then a cruise on the Mark Twain Riverboat, a hike to the Mark Twain memorial lighthouse, then a one-man show, Mark Twain Himself, topped off with dinner at the Mark Twain Dinette.
I'll spare you Twain's bio or a literary retrospective, under the assumption that everybody basically knows his story and his work. Google away if you'd like. For the sake of the Last Thursday Book Club and in memory of the late Don Benoist, who picked at least two Twain books for us to read, I give you this quote:
"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
Put that on the LTBC website, Mike.
Some pictures:
Boyhood home and Tom Sawyer's picket fence.
Oh, look! A riverboat.
Two bridges just north of Hannibal. The first is the US36 highway bridge, completed in 2003, I believe our guide said. Behind that is a RR bridge. It has a section that elevates to let boat traffic through. Boat traffic has the right of way over rail traffic.
While we were on the river a "towboat" pushing 15 barges down the river came by. The total length of boat and barges was about a quarter mile. Our guide told us that to transport the same volume of material by "legally-spaced" 18-wheelers would take a caravan 35 miles long. Don't you just love statistics. Cost of river barge shipping is about half of that of truck shipping, where barge shipping is possible.
All this got me to thinking about what I found to be a fascinating book by John McPhee that I read a couple of years ago. Title was "Uncommon Carriers," and it's about the heavy shipping industry: trains, trucks, and boats. McPhee traveled with them all and had some interesting stories to tell.
Here's a statue of Tom and Huck.
Up on the hill behind the statue is a lighthouse, built in 1935 as a memorial to Twain on the 100th anniversary of his birth. (Incidentally, Twain (Clemens) was born and died (1910) in years in which Halley's Comet came by.) I plodded up the 226 steps to get there and was rewarded with this view.
I don't know if it was the climb, or the ice cream afterwards, or the Mark Twain Himself show itself, but I kept nearly falling asleep during the show. Susie had to keep jabbing me. Since there were only about a dozen of us in a small theatre, I knew Mark had his eye on me. Oh, well. I remember seeing Hal Holbrook himself do Mark Twain Tonight in Tonkawa, OK when I was in high school, and that was really something.
Back on the road tomorrow. Plan to criss-cross a half-dozen Mississippi bridges from here to Davenport, Iowa.
Cheers,
Susie and Rob
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