My dad drove me up to Champaign last weekend for an all-day on-campus web design class to kick off the online version of said class for this summer. It's a fairly boring and uneventful eight-hour drive each way, so we decided to add an adventure on the way back to Kansas by stopping in Hannibal, Missouri, childhood home of the beloved Mark Twain. Hannibal is a cute little town, but it's clear that its main source of income comes from capitalizing on its heritage as the Twains' former town of residence. Everything there was Twain-ed out from the Mark Twain caves, Mark Twain Lake, and Mark Twain Dinette to the Mark Twain bookstore and TwainTown (I'm not even sure what that is, considering it was the sign on a storefront, but I'm guessing it was one of the many Twain gift shops). It was Twainapalooza! Twainpochalypse! A town of epic Twainportions!
Not only did Dad and I get to tour Twain's boyhood home (and let me tell you, I literally crawled up and back down fifteen wooden stairs on hands and knees because I wasn't going to let a little thing like a broken foot rob me of the chance to see the second floor of Mark Twain's house), but we also toured a replica of Huck Finn's house, as well as the Mark Twain museum, which was really interactive and pretty impressive. I could have stayed there all day long, checking out all of the other little shops in town (it was like stepping back in time), but we had to get home. So after a refreshing root beer float in the Mark Twain Ice Cream Parlor (where we sat next to two little boys, one schooling the other that the only way to play Tic Tac Toe is "fair and square"), I beat back my longing to take a horse-drawn carriage tour of the town and we got back in the car to finish our trip, visions of literary wonder dancing in our heads.
Not only did Dad and I get to tour Twain's boyhood home (and let me tell you, I literally crawled up and back down fifteen wooden stairs on hands and knees because I wasn't going to let a little thing like a broken foot rob me of the chance to see the second floor of Mark Twain's house), but we also toured a replica of Huck Finn's house, as well as the Mark Twain museum, which was really interactive and pretty impressive. I could have stayed there all day long, checking out all of the other little shops in town (it was like stepping back in time), but we had to get home. So after a refreshing root beer float in the Mark Twain Ice Cream Parlor (where we sat next to two little boys, one schooling the other that the only way to play Tic Tac Toe is "fair and square"), I beat back my longing to take a horse-drawn carriage tour of the town and we got back in the car to finish our trip, visions of literary wonder dancing in our heads.
.JPG)
The Mississippi River, which never ceases to remind me of Huck and Jim 
We stopped for lunch on the way in at the Mark Twain Dinette. They had the most delicious homemade root beer I've ever tasted..JPG)
A sculpture of Twain and all of his literary characters. This was supposed to have been made into a life-size sculpture to honor Twain's 100th birthday in 1935, but no one could raise enough money during the Depression to make it happen.
The Huckleberry Finn House
Room One in the Huck Finn House. The ceilings were super low, even for the vertically challenged like myself.
Room Two in the Huck Finn House
Twain's boyhood home is on the right.
Inside Twain's boyhood home
Strangely, even though he only lived there as a boy there are adult statues of Twain in every room in his house.
This quotation hits me right in the happy spot...
A really cool (and really old) drug store in downtown Hannibal
Twain's father's law office
Tom Sawyer's Fence, which has been signed by many tourists (I had no pen so sadly, I wasn't one of them)
Downtown shops--you can see TwainTown on the right
The Becky Thatcher House
The Mark Twain bookstore
A horse and trolley contraption will take you on a tour of downtown Hannibal. The ice cream parlor my dad and I went to is to the left of the horse and trolley.
Tom and Huck
1 comment:
Hannibal is awesome! The cave is a great way to cool down after trolling around in the disgusting Missouri summer. It was on my way home from college, back in the day, too. (this is Laura, btw, my screen name is a bit ambiguous)
Post a Comment