Persons Attempting to Find a Plot in This Narrative Will Be Shot

I am a history person. I love anything historical. Plus I just like to see places and things I've read about.

The Great Obnoxious Family Nauvoo Road Trip was able to answer to both those aspects of my personality.

For one thing, Nauvoo is right on the Mississippi River. Oh, the Mississippi! After years of learning trivia about the Mississippi for geography class and counting to 100 Mississippi during hide-and-go-seek and spelling out M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I at recess to prove my competence to the other kids, I had a strong desire to see the thing for myself.

It's exactly as everyone says it is and more. The Mississippi River is a river like the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground--technically a correct description, but inadequate.

Then there was the Church history stuff itself. Let me sum up that part for you:

Mormons live somewhere. People hate them. Mormons are driven out and go live somewhere else. Those people also hate them. Mormons are driven out again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Forever and ever. Infinitely and beyond.

Literary analysis of this summary: Everyone hated Mormons. Actually, lots of people still do. But that's okay. We've done pretty well for ourselves anyways.

Last but not least, we went to Hannibal. Hannibal is in Missoura and is famous for being the boyhood home of Mark Twain.

Although, like everyone else, Mark Twain hated Mormons, you really got to admire the guy. Not only was he hilarious, he could make a story out of anything. Like Hannibal, which was the backdrop of his very famous Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn stories.

Man. Oh man. Oh man oh man oh man. Hannibal looks exactly as I imagined St. Petersburg (the fictional name Twain uses for Hannibal, not the city in Russia). I mean, I never really thought to myself, "St. Petersburg looks like such-and-such," but when I saw it, it was so familiar. The streets, the houses, the whitewashing fence--all right out of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

I came, I saw, I ate catfish. The catfish was delicious. I bought a Mark Twain mug that says, "Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please," and two huckleberry-flavored chocolates. The chocolates were scrumptious.

It was all very fulfilling.