Travel dates: November 16-21, 2018
Have I mentioned that I’ve become a bit of a college visit junkie? And to think I get to do this three more times! Our college road trips this year have given Ari and me a chance to see some cool things and spend some one on one time together during his last year at home (sniff).
The colleges this time around were Grinnell in Iowa and Knox in Illinois, and he liked both of them. Grinnell is pretty great because it has jungle gyms in the library:
Also lots of bikes and pretty arches:
Ari did an overnight visit in the dorms, but I stayed at the Hotel Grinnell, which is the hippest hotel I’ve ever stayed at. It’s in an old school building! So hip!
We ate at the hotel restaurant, which was called The Periodic Table. Get it?!
And Knox has ties to Abraham Lincoln, so everyone there was excited about how Ari has a brother named Abe. Ari sat in this chair that Abraham Lincoln also sat in!
But mostly I want to talk about a couple of stops that we fit in on the way up (we went the first half of Thanksgiving week, since Ari and Dave both had the whole week off (so Dave was home with the other kids and Ari didn’t have to miss any class). First up we stopped in Metropolis, Illinois to see Superman:
This is a really fun little stop, not far from the interstate. We planned to have lunch here and see the statue, but we found the restaurant options surprisingly lacking. I thought there’d be a few places along the little downtown strip near the statue, but we ended up at a Hardee’s. Which was….fine.
Anyway, though, we got to take our pictures with Superman:
And we decided to check out the Superman museum right across the street, too. This place bills itself as having the “world’s largest collection of Superman,” and I have no reason to doubt it’s telling the truth. There’s A LOT of Superman in this place. It is not, however, exactly what you would call curated. It’s wall to wall Superman stuff with little to no sense of organization. I think bringing Abe here might have been a disaster, but it was an enjoyable enough way to pass a half hour or so for Ari and me. And only $5 a person. There’s also an extensive gift shop here; if we’d been here last year when Abe was in his intensive Superman phase I could have done a lot of Christmas shopping.
Original Superman movie costume on very creepy Christopher Reeve mannequin:
And then the next day we devoted the whole morning/early afternoon to sightseeing in Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain. We spent most of that time seeing the boyhood home and museum. I’d had Ari read Huck Finn just before our trip so he would be all ready.
It was very cold and not at all crowded on the day of our visit. We started off at the Interpretive Center, where we bought our tickets ($12 for adults or $6 for kids 6-17) and looked at the exhibits about Twain’s life in Hannibal. They give you a map here with a route to follow so you can see all the different buildings and exhibits included with your admission.
Then we headed over to Huck Finn’s house….or, rather, the house that the kid Huck Finn was based on lived in:
Next up was the boyhood home itself, where there’s a self-guided tour. There’s a WPA built wall around the house, for reasons that are not entirely clear. It’s a nice wall:
Outside the house they have this fence with paintbrushes set up, and you’re obligated to take a picture pretending to whitewash it like in Tom Sawyer:
Across the street from the boyhood home, you can tour Becky Thatcher’s house. Most of the exhibits in here were geared for kids; you could pick a character card at the beginning and then see what 19th century Hannibal life would have been like for your character:
There’s a quick stop at the Justice of the Peace’s office next door. And then we walked down to the Mississippi River to take a look:
Normally one can check out Grant’s Drug Store at this point, but it’s closed for renovations right now, so we moved on to museum #2 a little ways away from the Boyhood home downtown. We didn’t know what to expect here since we’d already toured the museum about Twain’s life….turns out this one has one floor with big displays about several of Twain’s works, a model of a steamboat pilot house (is that what one would call it? the place with the big wheel), and original Norman Rockwell paintings that he did as illustrations for Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. It was really nicely done; the first floor was set up so you could “walk through” the books, with recreations of the cave from Tom Sawyer, Huck and Jim’s raft, etc. Again, young kids would enjoy this; I want to bring Abe sometime.
We’d now seen everything the Boyhood Home and Museum had to offer, so we turned our attention to climbing a really, really big hill to see a fake lighthouse. At the edge of the downtown area, there’s a statue of Tom and Huck:
And next to this, there are lots and lots of steps leading up to a lighthouse that was built in honor of Mark Twain. It’s too far away from the water to serve any function; it’s just nice to look at. You can, incidentally, drive up to the lighthouse if you’re not feeling up for the steps. Or at least pretty close to it.
We finished off our stay in Hannibal with lunch at the Mark Twain Brewing Company, where they have good wings and beer and you can look at the river while you eat.
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The boyhood home looks like just the kind I like where you can wander around at your own pace.
The pilot house looks very authentic. One of the many school trips I took on the Belle of Louisville while growing up they took small groups of children up in the pilot house and allowed us to touch the wheel–not steer it, the pilot never took his hands off it, but we could feel the pull of it.
I’m glad to hear we got an authentic pilot house! There was a steamboat on the river that looked like it was for tourists, but we didn’t have time to try it out (not that we would have anyway, since it was something like 25 degrees that day)