On Thursday, we travelled from the south shore of Long Island to Danbury to attend a Dropkick Murphys concert at the Ives outdoor concert park. The next morning, I set an agenda to drop by the Stormfield area the next morning on our way south. I'm not always a fan of GPS, but as we had to change roads 8-10 times on our way down, I had to put up with it in this case. In less than a half hour, we were on a little barely paved road called "Mark Twain Lane." We were looking for the Lobster Pot, the cottage that Twain secured for his trusted (then disgraced) secretary Isabel Lyons. The Google map showed that it was just south of the main road, but it wasn't. After the road bends to the left, it ends rather abruptly. On the left, we did see the Lobster Pot. I walked out to check if the studio was entertaining visitors that day, but I got no response. I peeked in the glass door and was met by a portrait of Twain himself. Then I walked to the garden gate and took a peek (and a photo). On the way back to the car, I remember noticing a strange thing. There was no sound at all. Living on Long Island next to a parkway, that doesn't happen very often. I remember the same thing in Benson Arizona more than 40 years ago, but it's pretty rare. At the point where the road ends, there is an ornate stone gate identified as the number 30. I correctly guessed that this is the only part of the Twain estate that did not burn down at one time or another. There was no sign signifying this as private property, but I still didn't have the nerve to cross that gate. We drove south where there were a couple of houses and then nothing. The house at the end had giant scultures all over the front and back lawns. My main goal to was to find the Stormfield area, and we'd done that, so we went back to the highway. Just as we got on highway 53 we saw the Mark Twain Library in Redding. We had to stop for that because my wife and sons are also librarians. There was a bench with a sculpture of Twain looming in the background. Twain helped found this library just before his death, and his presence is felt in every corner of the building. All of the walls are adorned with his quotes including, sadly, the apocryphal one about how much his father had learned by the time that he (Twain) had turned 21. Since Judge Clemens died when Sam was a little boy, that doesn't add up. Later I looked at the Google Map again and switched to the Satellite view. To my great surprise, the area we had visited showed up as forested wilderness. Had I just made a trip to the Twilight Zone? Around the corner the library was there, but the Lobster Pot and the nearby houses didn't exist in Google Land. I tried MapQuest and, sure enough, saw every place that we had visited, as well as the reconstructed Stormfield well past the #30 gate. There's a mystery here, and maybe somebody in this group has an answer, but I'll just let that one ride for now. Photos I took on this trip can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/terryballard/ -- Terry Ballard Author and Leisure Studies Manager http://www.terryballard.org Author of the book "Google this" http://googlethis.com<http://googlethisforlibraries.com/> "My memory has a mind of its own."