Word: twain
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Down the line, a day's journey, is New York City, home of Radio City Music Hall (improbably, one of the best bargains in town) and, this year, the Democratic National Convention. Twain likes the Rockettes, but thinks the Democrats are even more improbable. At night, Central Park features Shakespeare (which Trollope finds surprisingly good) and muggings ("Cut-purses," says Dickens smugly). A most unusual event, they discover, is a relay of 27 "Liberty Torch" runners who will carry water from the Atlantic Ocean across the entire country and dump it into the Pacific. The purpose, like the water...
Then southward, first for a stop in antebellum Charleston, where Twain insists on renting an electric boat to tour the ricefield bogs; and Savannah, Ga., with its quaint cobblestone streets and a gracious populace that calls outsiders "visitors," not "tourists." In New Orleans they stroll through the somewhat scruffy but genteel French Quarter (prostitutes will stare from their wrought-iron balconies). Again, at Twain's insistence, they pause at a Dixieland jazz joint and later dine aboard one of the Mississippi steamboats...
...lights extinguished, and a sound and light show dramatizes Lincoln's "House Divided" speech. Not far away, in the woods along the Sangamon River, the travelers visit Rutledge Tavern, where Lincoln paid only 15¢ for his meals. "You can't get a Baskin and Robbins for that today," snorts Twain. "What," inquires Trollope, "are a Baskin and Robbins...
...gateway to one of the nation's most remarkable monuments?Mount Rushmore's great granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. A local menu offers buffalo burgers, which are indifferently appreciated until they see a herd of live buffalo in Custer State Park. Tour Guide Twain also takes his friends to Dead wood, the old cowboy town where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane did things together that went unrecorded in children's schoolbooks. The main street is largely a series of tourist traps, but the three are intrigued by a helicopter lifting felled trees...
Turning southwest, they cross the Continental Divide, push past gaudy Las Vegas and climb the Sierra Nevadas, pausing at Donner Pass. Here, explains Twain, whose lecturing is becoming a mild irritant, a wagon train, led by George and Jacob Donner in the winter of 1846-47, became trapped in a fierce snowstorm. Several members of the party died, whereupon the survivors proceeded to cannibalize the dead. Twain, having now discovered the credit-card culture, suggests that this event gave rise to the Donner's Club. Trollope is puzzled. "Is that like Carte Blanche?" Dickens, who has been dozing, starts...