HANNIBAL HIGH SCHOOL
FOOTBALL FIELD!
Our Man Bullen....Tight beard man.
Just me hanging out eating some Woolly Mammoth meat with my bff's...those are so my mannerisms!
So Illinois was interesting. Kind of. The roads were not nearly as nice as those in Indiana, but they weren't as bad as the ones in Ohio either. We never officially got greeted into Illinois. We got greeted to Chicago, kind of, but never to Illinois. I guess if I were making greeting signs for the state of Illinois, I would want to emphasize the fact that Chicago is contained within that state's parameters as well.
The one thing I really wanted to do most on this trip was to go to Chicago. I'm not sure why, but that's one city I've always really wanted to visit. I wanted to go to Chicago and get a deep-dish Chicago style pizza. So we got to Chicago and found a place to get a pizza in a really nice restaurant called Giordanos. It was basically a deep-dish stuffed pizza, with the sauce on top and the cheese and everything packed into the middle. It looked really familiar, and I am almost positive if you watch the Travel Channel and the show they have on there all the time about pizzas that you'll see Giordano's. Needless to say, the pizza was sublime. There are some pictures that should probably get uploaded here, but I dont know how. I'll show them to you all somehow. The world needs to see the pizza I ate.
Anywho, during our time in Chicago, the Chicago Hockeyhawks were winning the Stanley cup! luckily, we got out of there before they actually won it but we got a hotel in Northern Illinois somewhere and saw them going crazy in the streets. The same streets that we were walking less than an hour ago. We heard that the parade for them was gonna be on the same street that Giordanos was on. We basically walked the whole parade route we realized while searching for Giordano's, which was pretty cool.
So the next day we went up to Kenosha, Wisconsin, which any good Hannibalonian knows was founded by people from Hannibal. They had a little museum we went through, and they had a book about the founding of Kenosha and talked all about John Bullen Jr., and his story of coming across it, which was pretty interesting.
Basically, Bullen talked a bunch of people into investing in his company in 1835 that was going west. They headed west with a few people, and founded a place called Pike Creek. Well, as they were setting up there, a couple of drifters from Chicago came through and tried setting up land there as well. Bullen and his crew tried to force them out, but the drifters just laughed at him because there was no law enforcement or land rights at that point in Wisconsin. So eventually, one of the drifters went to Chicago to get some supplies. At that point, a bunch of the Hannibalonians came and built a giant fence around his house signifying that that was all the land he was allowed. Well, the drifter came back with about a dozen big guys carrying his material, and it seemed as though a confrontation was going to be inevitable. They came to an agreement though about splitting up the land. The drifters built a saloon, but then left a couple of years later and died a year or so after that. Dude was probably a drunk. Anyways, the company Bullen founded wasn't really profitable, even though just about everybody in Hannibal owned a stake in it. So that's more or less the story of Kenosha. I continued looking through the book, and a page or two later was a picture - clear as day - of downtown Hannibal, NY from 1835 of the post office and that whole block of buildings right there, which is now like the pet shot, and jewelry store or video store or whatever they are now. There were a bunch of horse and buggies outside which was pretty neat to see as well.
So we left Kenosha with our next destination being Hannibal, Missouri. Someone who bleeds purple like us can't NOT stop in a major city named Hannibal! However, the drive was pretty monotonous and boring. I was getting pretty tired until something unbelievable happened...
So we were driving down the thruway and we were following right behind this ambulance. All of a sudden, the ambulance turns on the siren and just starts GUNNING it. We were traveling about 67 or so and staying right with it before it turned on the jets and pulled away from us. It must've gotten up to about 90 or so. However, one of the back doors must have been open or something, because a little ways down the road from us something came out of the back. We were the only cars in sight for quite awhile, and as we approached it, we pulled over to the side of the road. No other cars were in sight so I dashed out into the road, being the good Samaritan that I am and wanting to avoid any accidents, to grab what turned out to be a little cooler. I went to grab it and bring it to the side of the road, figuring it was empty, but I could feel something inside it. Curiosity got the best of me, and I really wish it didnt. I looked inside....and in it was a severed human toe with a bunch of ice. It was all stumpy, and whoever that toe belonged to didn't believe in very good foot hygiene because the nail was all yellowing and cracked and disgusting.
Anyways, I set the cooler down, and you all know who I called don't you?
I called the toe truck of course! HAHA I GOT YOU ALL!! And no, I didn't actually find a toe, it was a joke, just to be clear.
HA. So, we get to Hannibal, Missouri eventually and wanted to do just a bit of looking around. We wound up finding Hannibal High School. They're not the Warriors but are the Pirates. They're also red, not purple. They have a crazy cool football field though. Picture of that to come as well.
So I guess on the Agenda for tomorrow is the Mark Twain cave/museum or something along those lines. We're also gonna look around for some souvenirs or other things that say Hannibal on them. A Hannibal High School shirt would be sick. After that, we're gonna be driving to SD and do the Mt. Rushmore thing.
Just a few closing notes:
Why is there no sonic within 100 miles of Hannibal, NY? It's fantastic and fairly priced. I love it so much. It's everything I was hoping for and then some.
Lawns in Kenosha, Wisc? Fantastic and the grass is extra comfortable.
They don't have a sweet greeting sign when you cross over from Illinois, into Wisconsin.
There is a lake Geneva in Wisconsin.
I enjoy the watercolor painting called Color a giraffe by Janet Mach Dutton. http://floridawatercolor.org/images/gallery/Janet%20Dutton.jpg
So until tomorrow, maybe, hopefully, this has been you're glimpse into what those early American settlers had to go through to fulfill their Manifest Destiny. I'm not asking to be remembered on the same level as those first few heroic explorers who made it all the way west and chartered new territory like Lewis and Clark, but perhaps I could be remembered on like a Vasco da Gama or Amerigo Vespucci level or something.
No comments:
Post a Comment