On Topic: I'm a stranger here myself

It's another one of those mysteries of modern life I cannot hope to explain: Strangers always stop me to ask directions.

This occurs no matter where I am - it's happened in Manhattan, Chicago, Santa Fé and Portland, Maine. People have approached me near the Tower of London and along the Champs Élysées: “Excuse me, but can you tell me where …?”

I've no idea why this is. But I'm always flattered that folk I've never met before place their trust in me.

So much so that I always give them minutely detailed instructions on how to get where they want to go - even when, as is most often the case, I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

I can't help it.

Maybe I take pity on these fellow lost travelers as I personally have a rather, um, imperfect, let's say, sense of direction. But in my defense, that fallible internal GPS has led to some wonderful discoveries.

A number of years ago, I was trying to locate the bus stop to ride out to Stonehenge from the Salisbury train station. I got turned around and found myself on the outskirts of town - and in the distance I could see this striking medieval church spire.

It didn't look that far away, as the crow flies. So, being a sucker for overly designed architecture, I strolled over.

It came to pass, though, that the spire - and the actual Salisbury Cathedral itself - was quite a hike. It only appeared close because it's so phenomenally tall - the tallest in the United Kingdom, in fact, at more than 400 feet.

The cathedral, built during the years 1220 to 1258, turned out to be a wonder of Early English architecture, with its ornate columns, turrets and buttresses, friezes, and rib-vaulted ceilings.

As every good tourist worth his or her Rough Guide knows, getting lost often is its own reward.

One of the other charms of being an aimless sort of tourist is you can dawdle in other people's homes. Famous people's homes.

Auguste Rodin's 18th century townhouse in Paris, for example, is packed like an overstuffed Christmas stocking not only with his bold work - sculpture such as “The Gates of Hell” and a small version of “The Thinker,” monuments and drawings - but also with that from his vast collection. Art on display includes that of Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh and Camille Claudel.

The term “tourist” was coined by Mark Twain in his 1869 travel book, “Innocents Abroad” (which could have been subtitled “Americans Behaving Badly”).

As part of what I viewed as my literary education, I once made a pilgrimage to Hannibal, Mo., where you can see - but not enter - Sam Clemens's two-story boyhood home, as well as the weathered shack in which he was born that had been transported from “the almost invisible village” of Florida, Mo.

Also in Hannibal you can visit the Mark Twain Florist, Mark Twain Holiday Inn, Mark Twain Dry Cleaner and Mark Twain Doughnut Shop.

A similar though not quite as overwhelming nomenclature has infected Hartford, Conn., where Clemens built his big, gaudy house - just down the street from another 19th century showboater, P.T. Barnum.

However, practically the only means of gaining entrance short of cat-burglary is to pay for a guided tour.

When a friend and I visited, things went reasonably well until we got upstairs. Our docent, commenting on the relative smallness of a guest room, noted, “As Mark Twain once said, ‘Fish and visitors smell in three days.'?”

“Ben Franklin,” I chirped. It was out of my mouth before I realized it, I swear.

“No, no,” said the guide calmly, as if she were speaking to an antsy second-grader. “It was Mark Twain. Now, over here ….”

“It was Ben Franklin, ‘Poor Richard's Almanack,'?” I repeated.

The guide hesitated, unsure whether it would be better to engage this disruption head on or to continue to attempt to brush it off.

“Lots of people confuse the two, but it was Mark Twain who said it. Now, in this next room ….”

“No, I'm certain it was Ben Franklin. I majored in Mark Twain in college and I ….”

At this junction, my traveling companion tugged violently on arm and said, in a whisper loud enough for everyone in the mansion to hear, “Stop it. Stop it now.”

For the rest of the tour, various docents stationed throughout the house watched me intently, as if they suspected my next act of insurrection would be to slip a 19th century ashtray once used by the great man himself into my jacket pocket.

At the end, as our group filed out, I wrestled with bringing up the fish-and-visitors debate once more.

But I refrained. And surely by now they've forgotten all about it and I'd be allowed back in, right?