When I was a kid, Gramps would take me and Grandma and my cousin, Erik, on a family vacation. We usually drove down to Springfield, IL, because it was easy. Once we went to Washington, DC, and I remember not being very impressed with our nation's capital. We were going to the White House for a tour, but it was locked down for some reason I no longer recall.
But one year Gramps decided that he would take us to St. Louis to see the Arch. Grandma didn't want to go up because she had many fears, and heights was one of them. Gramps, Erik and I got into the most annoying elevator in the world (you can probably guess as to why). We got to the top, and Erik and I leaned out so we could look out the windows. Gramps didn't have many fears, but every once in a while he got nervous. He was afraid we would fall through I don't know how many feet of steel to our deaths below, so he grabbed the backs of our belts.
That same year he decided to take us to Hannibal, MO, home of Mark Twain because he knew I loved Mark Twain. For the time it was still a little boy's love of adventure. I had yet to get to some of the more interesting of his works. I recently read that after the US slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Filipinos just because we could that Mark Twain said we should replace the stars and stripes with a skull and crossbones. Perhaps you see the appeal to me.
Fast forward a few decades, and I'm driving to St. Louis as an adult. I first knew we were getting close because the Arch is so big it's impossible to miss. It's so much bigger than I remembered it to be. Aren't childhood memories the other way around? Things are supposed to be smaller than you remember.
Like the Mississippi River. I remember it being a lot wider, but we drove over the bridge pretty quickly. It seemed reminiscent of the Des Plaines River when you're heading south down 83. The Mississippi didn't seem all that impressive. Maybe when I was a kid we crossed it elsewhere. I don't know.
I thought briefly about going to Hannibal as an adult, but there was no way I had enough time. Not if I wanted to get back home before midnight. I also thought about maybe visiting one of my publishers. Don Noble lives in that area, and it's been ages since I've seen him. Again, I didn't have enough time.
Which is weird because the drive felt a lot shorter than I expected. The trip didn't feel long at all. I picked up my road partner about an hour from home, but after that it didn't feel like three hours. It felt like two, tops. The drive home felt more or less the same. We stopped at Bob Evans, something I haven't done since I was a kid. It was pretty good.
I haven't made up my mind about doing more shows yet. For more on that, tune in to this week's newsletter. But looking at the map I've decided that the farthest I can go in any direction is probably St. Louis, Indianapolis, Madison and Davenport. My aunt lives across the Mississippi from Davenport, so I might even have a place to stay if I go that way. I won't have to rely on a hotel.
We'll see.
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