Hannibal, MO

H-A-Double N-I--------B-A-L spells Hannibal,
Town of Mark Twain's birth and where he grew up at...................




I'm sorry was that out loud, well I guess you've figured out where we are, Hannibal Missouri the town made famous by Mark Twain, we're camped about 25 miles south of the town in Bowling Green.

Saturday, it's overcast and in the mid 50's but it's not raining so we're going to go for it and do a little Mississippi River road trip, first stop is in Louisiana, MO at Hardee's to fortify us with a big breakfast. As we pull out of the parking lot Cathy spots a historical marker across the street and we try to stop at these just to see what happened there, this one turned out to be pretty interesting. Turns out this is where the Delicious apple was developed, click on the picture of the marker to read all about it, now see that was worth the stop.

If you read down to the bottom of the marker you'll see a reference to Buffalo Fort, I have read about this somewhere in reference to the Buffalo Fort Massacre, as George Carlin use to say,”I really kind of like it when a lot of people die”. So to honor George we're of to find Fort Buffalo. I remember reading about a D Street so we just drove south until we found D Street, we took that about three miles out into the country and found a Monument on the side of the road which marks the spot of the fort.



We spotted a dirt road that was named Buffalo Street so we followed that and in about a mile or so we came across the Jordan Buffalo Cemetery, a pretty little cemetery on a hill side with one large Monolith right near the front of the cemetery. Turns out that this is the spot that the massacre took place and that they buried the bodies right were they found them, so this was also the start of the cemetery, turns out that Captain Robert Jordan and his son were killed here by Indians during the War of 1812 . It also turns out that in Missouri a massacre starts with the killing of two people.


OK, time to get back to the Great River Road and our journey, we're going south to the town of Clarksville, they are having their big Apple Festival this weekend, we can tell when we're getting close to town since the traffic is backed up and moving 2 MPH. We decided to drive through town see what was happening where and then find a place to park and dig into all the apple goodies, remember this area is the home of the Delicious Apple so we should be a few pounds heavier by the time we leave, what will I have first, candy apple, caramel apple, baked apple, apple fritter, no I think it will be a nice large slice of hot homemade apple pie with a slice of sharp cheddar cheese on top and a scope of vanilla ice cream on the side, yea, that's the ticket. Well we drove through town and it was packed with people and hardly any place to park so we turn around and figure we'll just grab the first place we see. Then it dawned on us, with all the set ups they had we did not see one single thing that had anything to do with apples, nothing. We kept our eyes open as we drove back through town, we saw gourds, corn dogs, all you can eat fish fries, hamburgers, hot dogs, BBQ of ever type, elephant ears, donuts and cookies, the only place that we saw the word Apple was on the souvenir T-shirts that said APPLEFEST 2009.

We're atta here and back on the road, 50 miles north to Hannibal on the scenic Great River Road, this section of road is also known as the “Fifty miles of Art” (that's another festival in the spring where you can buy corn dogs).

If we were expecting to see the river at all on this drive we were dead wrong, we came across two scenic turn outs that took you up on top of a bluff so you could see the river off in the distance, I don't know how close to the river we were but it felt like we were driving through the mountains in Kentucky. A little break and a chance to see the Mississippi as we past back through Louisiana en-route to Hannibal.

Hannibal is the big city around here, it has the bridge to Illinois and just about every kind of store or business you can think of, the downtown Historic District looked just about how you think it would have during Mark Twain's time. We found a place to park and walked around about as long as our thin jackets would allow us to, it's cloudy and cold and windy so we saw a few sights, took a few pictures and decided to head home.







This turned out to be a great weekend for the little sister and a real bummer for the big brother, no I'm not talking about our grand kids Rachel and Nick, I'm talking about the Spartans of Michigan State and the Wolverines of Michigan, since the Spartans were playing Illinois we managed to listen to there victory on the radio and we got home in time to watch the Iowa Hawk-eyes swoop down, grab the Wolverines up in their claws and carry them away.

It's going down to 31 degrees tonight, so we're just going to sleep in and watch baseball and football all day Sunday, and Cathy promised to make here World Famous Baked Potatoe (in honor of Vice President Quayle) Soup for the very first time,I know, but if she makes it, it will be world famous. I'm going to get some brownie points when she reads that.

SOUPS ON..........more later..........