30.6.2012 – 30.6.2012  41 °C

Nice early start here in Hannibal today, all because of the weather! Once 8am hits, the heat is already well past comfortable! We started the morning by walking around the historic area of Hannibal. Hannibal was the home to Mark Twain from the time he was 4 til 17 (by the way Mark Twain is a pen name for Sam Clemens— the name Mark Twain comes from one of the river boats he captained). The town is a really cool little place. It is filled with mid 1800 buildings that are still in great order and are all used! No dumpy broken down houses/ buildings in this funky little town!!

Once 9am came around the Mark Twain museum opened up so we hopped inside to check out the actual home of Mark Twain! His house is still setup in 1850s style and from what I can see he didn’t have it too badly.. Apparently, his parents were quite wealthy before he was born but by the time he came around the family fortune had dried up and by the time he was 12 his mother had to sell all of the slaves. This is an interesting fact, Mark Twain grew up with slaves in his house (well actually there was only really one slave left in the house by the time he was born). He knew that they were “different” but he writes that when he was a little kid it didn’t matter.. you played with whoever wanted to play with you!

The character, Tom Sawyer is based on himself when he was about 10. Huck Finn (the actual boy was Tom Blankenship) was a boy that lived around the corner from Tom. He was from a very poor family and I guess his family was considered “white trash” so of course Mark’s mum did not want him to hang out with Tom…. Like everything, if it’s off limits generally that makes it more attractive and so the friendship between the two grew. From what I could grasp from the museum much of Tom Sawyer is actually a good reflection of his early life (although of course a bit embellished). Huck Finn (the sequel to Tom Sawyer) is more of a political statement. Mark explores the whole debate about slavery during this story and although he was brought up where slavery was normal, later in life he really abhorred slavery and apparently this is reflected throughout this story. The museum was top shelf and explained the life of Mark quite well. Actually, after hearing about his childhood I have really gotten the inspiration to actually download these books and have a read!

We left Hannibal late in the morning and started our long drive up to Chicago. Traffic was surprisingly light on the interstates today so we spent the whole day driving direct to Chicago.. (It’s quite pleasant when you don’t have to go hunting for a side road because traffic is too bad on the main road!!) We stopped for lunch at the small town of Sherman Illinois. This town was once on Route 66 and we were fortunate enough to find the old route and even find the picnic area that supports the route! The poor old road is in pretty poor repair and today is only really visible for photographs (you wouldn’t want to try and drive on it)… Sadly, the picnic area was also pretty ordinary.. at least it was shady!!

The final leg of our trip saw us drive thru a thunder storm and finally arrive into hot Chicago (not quite as hot as St Louis though) just before dinner time. We booked into our hotel and immediately had to work out what to do with our car… The hotel was asking a parking rate of 49 dollars a night! (The rental isn’t even that much a day!!!).. We started our drive around town looking for something cheaper… Forty minutes later the cheapest car parking space we could find was 25 dollars!! We decided to call up the car rental company to see if we could drop our car off early (we are swapping the car in a couple of days anyhow).. Fortunately we could give the car back early and even get a refund on the couple of days rental that we didn’t use!!!! We ended up well over a hundred dollars ahead (and if we kept the car for the full time we would have been hundreds ahead)

Two hours later all our car woes were ended and we were sitting across the road from our hotel in a bar drinking a beer and having some dinner.. A nice end to a really long day!

Song of the Day– Jim Croce, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown