As the clerk handed me my room key she proudly said, “You might be interested to know that we just got a new treadmill in our exercise room. In case you feel the inclination to walk.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Good to know.”

I ate dinner across the street at a small, shoebox-shaped diner, Hannibal fried chicken with biscuits and sawmill gravy, then returned to the hotel to soak in the hot tub. I read a little of my Jesse James book, then retired early.

Being in Hannibal lifted my spirits, and, perhaps for the first time since I left Seattle, I felt more like a tourist than a man on a pilgrimage. The next morning I went for a walk around the town, stopping for breakfast and coffee at the Java Jive on Main Street. My waitress was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. I guessed her to be in her early to mid twenties, but she was dressed in retro clothing: a formfitting striped dress with a red beret and sash and high-heeled shoes. She reminded me of one of those girls that B-52 bomber squads painted on the noses of their flying coffins.

The pastry and coffee were good and I leisurely drank my coffee, the tourist traffic outside as meandering as the river the town parallels. It was a pleasure to watch others walk for a change.

I hadn’t planned on spending the day in Hannibal, but an hour into the morning I knew I would. After finishing my second coffee I walked north to see Twain’s home.

The Mark Twain historic complex was well preserved with cobblestone streets closed off to automobile traffic. Among the buildings still standing are Twain’s boyhood home, complete with the white fence Tom Sawyer hoodwinked the neighbor boys into painting, and the reconstructed home of Tom Blankenship—the boy Huckleberry Finn was based on. Twain wrote of his friend Tom:

His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us. We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy’s.

There was also Twain’s father’s justice of the peace office and the home of Laura Hawkins, the neighbor girl on whom Twain had based the character Becky Thatcher. In this, the author and I shared common ground—both of our lives were forever changed by the girl next door.

After touring the homes, I walked south along the bank of the Mississippi until I came to the loading plank of the Mark Twain riverboat. I paid fifteen dollars for a one-hour cruise and boarded the craft.