Day 3 – Lost in a Time Warp

Lincoln's parlor

Today it seemed like we were stuck in a Time Warp. The mid-19th century to be specific. We started by touring the Abraham Lincoln home in Springfield where he lived until 1860 and the house is furnished as it was when Lincoln lived there with much of his own furniture. Visiting president's homes is getting to be a habit for us, at least on recent long trips. We saw Bill Clinton's in Hope, AR, last year and Harry Truman's in 2010.

Tom Sawyer house

Our next stop was in Hannibal, MO. I need to also explain that we have been listening to “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” as a book-on-tape for the past two days so it set the mood for the visit. The story is a little disturbing as the voice of Huckleberry Finn sounds exactly like Bill Clinton. Don’t know if that was intentional or not, but it was creepy. In any case, Tom Sawyer is loosely based on Samuel Clemens’ boyhood in Hannibal in the 1840’s and the friends that he had there. We toured the Clemens house [see photo], Becky Thatcher’s house and even got to whitewash the fence. Then we wandered the town until a paddle wheeler pulled into port. It was the Queen of the Mississippi [see photo] on its way from Saint Louis to Minneapolis for an 8-day cruise. You might think that the visit of a paddle wheeler would also be a throw back to another century, but this ship was built in 2012 complete with satellite and flat screens TVs in every room. Snapped us back to the present and we left town before the herds of tourists awoke the sleepy little town.

The "Queen of Mississippi"

The rest of the drive to St. Joseph, MO, was pretty routine as we continued to drive through corn and soy fields the whole way. St. Joseph is historically famous as the starting point of the Pony Express but in fact isn’t the prettiest of towns today and reminded us a lot of Conshohocken back home. Old, lots of brick and build along a river, in this case the Missouri. The one redeeming point of the stop was dinner at Culvers, complete with a concrete (extra thick ice cream). Culvers is also a regular stop on our long driving trips.