Tom and Becky my Mark Twain

Yesterday we had a sleepy morning since we were recovering from the long day before. We each got about 9 hours of sleep and then went to lunch at Osage Cafe at the Bowood farms close to our project site in CWE. It was a spectacularly beautiful day, cool, breezy, and sunny, and we sat by a window in front  of a planter in the giant greenhouse/warehouse while we ate. Saori ordered a delicious tomato risotto with shrimp and andouille sausage, and Yoshiko-san and I both got the 'Brie L.T." which was essentially an open sandwich with smoked canadian bacon, melted brie, and covered with arugula. Pretty good potato salad too, with a mix of red potatoes and dijon mustard.

Afterwards, we picked up Zhuli, a friend of ours from studio and drove out to Hannibal, about a 2 hour journey by car. Hannibal, birthplace of Mark Twain, is a small town with a few walkable streets in the old main street, and nearly every store and restaurant makes a reference to the author. There's a massive "Hotel Mark Twain," several musuems, dozens of stores selling books, rotating figures, and everywhere are placards and posters for Tom and Becky competitions, Mark Twain Live, Tom Sawyer steamboat adventures, and lantern tours of Mark Twain cave. We did actually want to take a lantern tour, but unfortunately we came too late in the season: the bats were already beginning their hibernation for the winter. We were able to do the regular tour of the Mark Twain cave, however.

I was kind of expecting a cave cave, like the amazing caves they have in Arizona and New Mexico, with phenomenal caverns, stalactites and stalagmites everywhere. This was a pretty staid cave. Only a few stalactites, basically a crisscrossing network of slots through the limestone. It was more of a historic cave rather than a geologic cave. Supposedly, the adventures of Tom Sawyer was semi-autobiographical and that the cave described towards the climax of the book was this actual cave, and references landmarks within the cave. Apparently, parents in the town let their kids play in the caves all the time- when the kids would go in, they would write thier name on a slate at a certain point of the cave, and when they left, they would erase it to let the rest of the people know that they got out safely. It would have been a lot of fun to run around with my friends in the darkness of the cave with nothing but a candle.

Anyway, after the cave, we drove the 2 hours back to St.Louis in the drizzling rain and enjoyed dinner at LuLu's Chinese food, which was actually pretty good.