Mark Twain

Monday, September 25, 2023

We lingered over breakfast like you should while you are on vacation. How lovely.

We packed up (an easy process because I have packed us up brilliantly using packing cubes. We can unpack and pack up again in less than 5 minutes. It’s been great) and left 45 minutes early for our tour of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. It was raining pretty hard, and the traffic seemed to be going VERY fast and I was moderately terrified, so I glued myself to Duolingo and tried to think of it instead of the traffic.

We arrived at our destination, or so said map lady. Um…. We were definitely at a little liquor store, not Mark Twain’s parking lot. Keith had literally clicked on the link from the website, so it didn’t make much sense, but we were definitely not where we needed to be. We quickly tried again and were on our way. It said it was 4.8 miles away and it would take us 13 minutes.

I thought it should take 4.8 minutes, because apparently I only travel at 60mph. It actually did take 13 minutes. We raced from the parking lot, up the stairs, and to the ticket desk, arriving at 11:32. There was no sign of the 11:30 tour. The only woman behind the desk was on the phone and there was a couple waiting, ahead of us.

I was hoping we could run and catch the 11:30 tour – we couldn’t have missed much. The lady on the phone kept talking. Another minute passed. She was selling a pair of tickets to someone who wanted to come on October 6. We bought our tickets online in less than a minute the night before, because it said tours sell out and we should get advanced tickets. Another minute passed. The lady was reading off all of the times tours are available. 10:00, 10:15, 10:30, 10:45, 11:00, 11:15…are you getting the pattern? Apparently the woman on the phone wasn’t. Another minute.

We asked the couple ahead of us if they would mind if we jumped ahead of them, quickly explaining our situation. They said it was no problem. They had also had problems getting there with phone vs car GPS totally disagreeing. They were hoping to get tickets for the living history tour, given by a costumed actor, at noon. We chatted with them about being from Minnesota and they being from Ohio. Three minutes passed. The phone lady was telling about living history tours. The couple said she had been on the phone before they arrived, several minutes before we got there.

There is something about holding on to hope. You can tell yourself to calm down or to relax or that it doesn’t matter, but as long as there is hope, you are holding on. At 11:40, I lost hope. Or I switched my hope over to the lady being able to give us credit for our $52 toward a tour at a different time. At 11:47, she hung up and said she could certainly change our time.

Huzzah!

Then she said the next tour was sold out. I almost burst out laughing. Then she said it wasn’t sold out. I did burst out laughing. She gave us new tickets and we spent time in the gift shop. I found lots of fun things to look at. There was a shelf of little, yellow, stuffed rectangles with smiley faces. Sort of rectangles. I was trying to decide if they were somehow butter (butter? They looked NOTHING like butter) when Ketih came up and just said, “They are Connecticuts.” HA! They were. I took their picture. Keith held one up so the northern border was parellel to the ground. “Isn’t the top level and the rest is wonky?” HA! I have no idea. I have no idea where we are. In Connecticut, yes, but where is Connecticut? East. That’s all I know.

I decided that I would just take a crooked picture of a Connecticut guy and make the top level to the picture. Then I decided there should only be one Connecticut guy on the shelf. I smooshed the others over and then they fell on the ground. I picked them up and carefully replaced them, then I couldn’t get a picture of my guy alone without them showing because I couldn’t smoosh them so far. So, I picked them up and tried holding seven of them and taking a picture at the same time. That was not very successful, but I only dropped two. Keith must have been watching me do my slapstick routine, because he came over and took them from me and I got the picture of the day.

We went to the spot to gather for our tour at the right time, and Keith stopped at the desk to tell the worker there then that clicking on their website had not worked to get us there. He said there was probably something wrong with our GPS. I was going to say maybe something is wrong with your website, but I decided that what did I know and what did I care at that point?

Our phone talking ticket seller lady was our tour guide. She knew a lot of things about the house and about Sam Clemons. It was interesting, though, if anyone asked her a question, she was broken. She would just repeat the last line of her spiel about the house and say, “This house is a restoration house.”, even if the question was, “What is this?” (I kept thing she would say, “Today is your birthday.” Statement of fact.) There were no pictures allowed in the house, and there were so many trees and rain outside, that I didn’t even get a good shot of the exterior.

The house was lovely, and the tour was enjoyable. There were additional displays and a movie by Ken Burns, so we spent most of the afternoon there. It was very rainy (go away, Hurricane Ophelia), so it was a fine way to spend the day.