Monday, 19 April 2021
I'd had time to think about my computer situation during the night and decided if I had to, I'd just buy another one. If a computer repair person couldn't figure out why my computer wasn't charging when the cord was plugged in, and if they didn't have a battery to replace mine, I'd just have to replace the computer. Because I've chosen to - insisted on - not having a smart phone, I didn't see that I had much choice.
Driving into town, I heard on the radio that thanks to the recent blockage of the Suez Canal, gardeners in the United Kingdom are experiencing a massive shortage of garden gnomes. (There'll always be an England.)
In Columbia all 4 lanes of traffic stopped for a school bus, which was stopped for much longer than usual because one of the kids was late. We all just had to sit there. And sit there. And I marveled that drivers have so internalized the importance of stopping for school buses that nobody did anything to show impatience, other than those that just chose to go a different route.
I'd left the campground at 7:20 so it was fairly early when I got to town. I drove around and around the campus area without finding a store or even a sign that said computers. In desperation I stopped a passing professor-looking type and asked, and he said oh, yes, what I wanted was TigerTech in the student center (not to be confused with the student union, which I did and confused a student who was trying to help me).
I learned that the University of Missouri closes all its campus streets to traffic for 6 hours during the day when I got caught because a road I'd gone down earlier had been blocked off in the meantime. I finally found a sign indicating visitor parking, and found a lot big enough for us with parking meters. I put in my 4 quarters for an hour and then learned that particular meter wasn't working. Really. Am I turning into some kind of jinx?
I walked the 2 or 3 blocks to the student center and found TigerTech in the basement, and several very nice people ended up helping me. The first thing we discovered was that my computer didn't want to charge even with a different cord.
A different person was delegated to find me a replacement. They happened to have a Dell almost exactly like mine that had been a demo and they were selling for half price. So I bought it. But it turns out I wasn't supposed to because that store is meant to be just for people affiliated with the university in some way. They said if I'd wanted to buy an Apple product they wouldn't have been able to sell it to me because Apple was really strict, but Dell was much more flexible. Which is yet another reason I don't want to buy an Apple product.
Then the first guy figured out from my not very clear explanations what programs I'd been using and got most of it set up on the new one. By that time, my old computer suddenly decided to start taking a charge (I think it was jealous of the new one), and I had visions of standing at that counter for however many hours it would take to charge it up.
But by then I'd been gone for more than an hour and felt like I owed the dogs a walk. So since the guy had gotten this new one looking a lot like my old one - and some of the differences may have been due to a different version of Windows 10 operating on the new one - I just thanked everybody profusely and took both computers back to the RV.
The dogs got a little walk under a grove of magnolias, Gracie rolled around on the grass there, and we all felt a little more refreshed, so we hit the road. I'd originally planned only about 3 hours of driving to various places, and it was 10:15 when we left, so I had hopes we might still be able to make the route. If not, it was easy enough to curtail the plans somewhere.
On the road
North of Columbia, we passed through the tiny town of Clark (298 residents in 2010) and then much larger Moberly, pop. 13,974. Moberly, established in 1866, calls itself "The Magic City" and for the life of me I can't figure out why. Its Wikipedia page mentions this nickname but gives zero explanation. What I saw looked like an early 20th century town, but the magic escaped me somehow.
What was significant to me about both towns is that Gen. Omar Bradley was born in Clark and went to high school in Moberly, and neither town even so much as mentioned his name. Gen. Bradley was the first (THE first) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in charge of US military policy during the Korean War and, in 1950, was the last person that has been promoted to five-star rank in the US Armed Forces. Given all that, you'd think that at least one of these towns would claim him, and the fact that neither has is weird to me. And if you're curious, as I was, about that 5-star rank business, here's the list of the 9 who've made it and why. https://www.wearethemighty.com/the-9-five-star-generals
I took a little side trip to the town of Huntsville, pop. 1,544, because it's the county seat of Randolph County, which Clark and Moberly are also part of.
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| Randolph County Courthouse in Huntsville |
Randolph County, name for John Randolph of Virginia, is part of Missouri's Little Dixie Region, which I found out about only via Moberly's Wikipedia page. This apparently appropriately named area runs the width of Missouri from north of St. Louis, including Hannibal, all the way across to Kansas City. The 1860 census put Missouri's enslaved population at 10% of the total, but in the Little Dixie Region, the percentage ran as high as 50% in some counties. The area was primarily settled by migrants from Kentucky and Tennessee, who brought their slaves and their farming practices westward with them. There's more information about it at this Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/Little-Dixie
As I was driving east from Huntsville (20 of the 50 states have a town named Huntsville, and the ones I've visited are all completely different from each other), I saw a wild turkey walking away from the road into the tall grasses nearby. That was nice.
I passed through the small town of Madison, pop. 554, established in 1836, and saw the first of 3 Trump signs/flags for the day. Maybe instead of number per day I ought to note them in terms of number per miles driven. Today I drove a total of 126 miles, including my round-trip jaunt to Columbia this morning. And Columbia, as befits a major college town, seemed to be fairly liberal, in a Southern sort of way.
My next destination was the Union Covered Bridge State Historic Site, which made a refreshing interlude.
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| Union Covered Bridge, built 1871 |
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| The bridge is now closed to all but pedestrian traffic, which preserves not only the bridge but also the ability to see what the area looked like when it was needed. |
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| This low water crossing shows what the bridge was avoiding. The road is now useable only by golf carts and horses, in my opinion. In fact, a MO park ranger crossed here in a golf cart to check on us. |
The state had a fact-filled display nearby explaining the history of covered bridges (beginning with the Babylonians and the Euphrates River, believe it or not), their development in the US and specific facts about this bridge and its design. They were actually pretty interesting.
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| This is what the fuss is about - Union Bridge's double Burr trusses. Beautiful, isn't it? |
From the bridge, we traveled the 10 miles to Paris, pop. 1,220, founded in 1831, and a county seat.
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| Monroe County Courthouse in Paris |
I was disappointed that this Paris was low on charm in comparison to the one in Texas, though I'm sure it's a nice town and in 1911 they did build this impressive courthouse (though it took the county 3 tries before voters approved the bond issue). It's the last domed courthouse built in Missouri.
From there I drove the 20 miles to the Mark Twain State Park, which is situated on Mark Twain Lake, and contains the Mark Twain Birthplace - which I learned has been moved (the original cabin, that is) inside what they call the Mark Twain Memorial Shrine.
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| Mark Twain Memorial Shrine and Mark Twain State Park office |
I'm a big fan of Twain's writings and would like to have seen the "handwritten manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" their brochure claims to have (this building was closed for the virus, of course), but calling it a "shrine" sticks in my throat somehow. Well, we all have our own ideas.
We had a fairly comfortable stay at the state park for the night, partly due to the small number of other campers, even for a Monday, which made walking the dogs easier.
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