During our drive from Nashville to St. Louis last week we had crossed the Tennessee and Ohio rivers, they were both high but not threatening to flood. On the way from St. Louis to Iowa City we crossed the Missouri and Iowa rivers, neither of which looked unusually high. But the highway we were traveling approached the Mississippi at Hannibal, and we decided to stop and check out Mark Twain’s home town and the setting for his Tom Sawyer tales.
The Mighty Mississippi at Hannibal.
Hannibal is a substantial town, quite apart from the scenic and touristy downtown riverfront area devoted to Mark Twain and his life and literary world. And the Mississippi is indeed an impressively gargantuan river, not surprising that it lent considerable importance to the city when the river was the major mode of transport of goods and people up and down the midwest.
Jan whitewashing Tom Sawyer's fence.
George communing with Mark
Jan got to help whitewash Tom Sawyer’s famous fence, and old Mark was quite accommodating in posing for a photo with George. But it turns out we didn’t know a soul in Hannibal (no, Helen, it seems we do not know everyone in the world). So we bid farewell to the mighty river and pushed on to Iowa City, although we would cross the Mississippi a couple more times on our travels.
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