I don't entirely remember what my preconceptions of Alabama were before we arrived, but I do recall expecting a pretty foreign place. I figured there would be strange accents and, if I were being honesty, a bit of racism. I was right on both accounts. Driving through the back roads of Alabama we came across some pretty strong southern accents when we stopped for gas or groceries. A number of times after being spoken to we had to sit there for a few stunned seconds while we tried to parse what was being said to us, or, in Meg's case, hoped that I could figure it out. I think the racism charge was maybe a little harsh, but there are Confederate flags everywhere down in the south. Until 2000 the flag flew atop the South Carolina capitol! The claim from the flag wavers is that it represents southern heritage and their cultural distinctiveness from the north. I wonder though if my heritage was fighting a civil war mainly over the right to enslave people I might be less keen on celebrating it. But I guess that's another part of the claim, that the civil war was fought more over the southern states' anger at a strong federal government and high taxes, than slavery. Anyway, for Meg and me it is weird to see the flag so much, and we definitely haven't seen any black people celebrating their southern heritage with a confederate flag.
Our first stop in Alabama, literally right across the border from Columbus, Georgia, was Phenix City. My cousin Ashley married a fellow in the U.S. army who is based at Fort Benning (there is some confusion between Meg and I here, he might actually be in the air force since he is in charge of parachute rigging, but Fort Benning is an army base?). It was Meg's first chance to meet Ashley, and the first time for both of us to meet Chris since we had missed their wedding by just a month or so at the start of our trip. We had a really nice visit. Chris tried to explain to us a little about the military: squads, platoons, brigades... And also gave us a tour of Fort Benningwhich was absolutely huge! Evidently it contains 120,000 people. We can't confirm that, but it did have a full hospital, many restaurants and hang outs, several neighbourhoods, and a heck of alot of young guys with short hair. After touring the base we went downtown and after a nice pub dinner with some really good local beer, toured around a bit. The next day, while Chris woke up at 5am to get into work and drill the young guys under his leadership, Meg and I slept in. By the time we woke up Chris had already been at work for five hours and had jumped out of a plane. Had we not been so lazy we could have actually gone down and watched all the fellows parachuting down which would have been great, also it was a big day for Chris as he had accumulated enough jumps to achieve his Master Parachutist badge.
After cursing our laziness and getting barked at by Ashley and Chris' dog a bit (he didn't like me at all, I think I may have had cat fur on me from Adrian and Tamara's) we made our way down to Montgomery. We were entering the civil rights portion of our American history tour, it was in Montgomery that Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. This led to a year long bus boycott which ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that segregating buses was unconstitutional. There is an excellent museum about the event in the city center, and that was our first destination. I don't know much about this chapter in American history and it was eye opening to read more about it. I was surprised to learn how organized and thought through the event was; Rosa Parks was a member of the NAACP; her lawyers had discussed using her case as a test case for bus segregation but decided against it for some technical reasons. The bus boycott that followed the initial event was also interesting. Through pay-as-you-can church run "taxi" services, and an alternate, station wagon, bus system almost everyone within the black community was able to go about life for a year without riding the bus. The bus company actually lost money during this time period and tried to have the boycott stopped (I didn't actually understand how that would have worked, would they have forced people onto the bus and then taken their money?). It was crazy too how few demands the boycotters had: bus drivers had to be polite to bus riders, there must be a fixed dividing line for white/black segregation, people must be seated on a first come first serve basis, and the bus company must higher black drivers for routes through the black neighbourhoods. They didn't even ask for desegregation of the buses at that point! Rather than give into their demands though, there were efforts to shut down the make shift taxi service, people lost their jobs and others were beaten and even killed.
After the Rosa Parks museum we did a walking tour of the city and of all things we found the first white house of the Confederate States as well as the first white house of Jefferson Davies. At the capitol they had the spot where Davies made his inaugural address marked with a star. It's a strange juxtaposition of civil war and civil rights history intermingling so much in one city.
Our first stop in Alabama, literally right across the border from Columbus, Georgia, was Phenix City. My cousin Ashley married a fellow in the U.S. army who is based at Fort Benning (there is some confusion between Meg and I here, he might actually be in the air force since he is in charge of parachute rigging, but Fort Benning is an army base?). It was Meg's first chance to meet Ashley, and the first time for both of us to meet Chris since we had missed their wedding by just a month or so at the start of our trip. We had a really nice visit. Chris tried to explain to us a little about the military: squads, platoons, brigades... And also gave us a tour of Fort Benningwhich was absolutely huge! Evidently it contains 120,000 people. We can't confirm that, but it did have a full hospital, many restaurants and hang outs, several neighbourhoods, and a heck of alot of young guys with short hair. After touring the base we went downtown and after a nice pub dinner with some really good local beer, toured around a bit. The next day, while Chris woke up at 5am to get into work and drill the young guys under his leadership, Meg and I slept in. By the time we woke up Chris had already been at work for five hours and had jumped out of a plane. Had we not been so lazy we could have actually gone down and watched all the fellows parachuting down which would have been great, also it was a big day for Chris as he had accumulated enough jumps to achieve his Master Parachutist badge.
After cursing our laziness and getting barked at by Ashley and Chris' dog a bit (he didn't like me at all, I think I may have had cat fur on me from Adrian and Tamara's) we made our way down to Montgomery. We were entering the civil rights portion of our American history tour, it was in Montgomery that Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. This led to a year long bus boycott which ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that segregating buses was unconstitutional. There is an excellent museum about the event in the city center, and that was our first destination. I don't know much about this chapter in American history and it was eye opening to read more about it. I was surprised to learn how organized and thought through the event was; Rosa Parks was a member of the NAACP; her lawyers had discussed using her case as a test case for bus segregation but decided against it for some technical reasons. The bus boycott that followed the initial event was also interesting. Through pay-as-you-can church run "taxi" services, and an alternate, station wagon, bus system almost everyone within the black community was able to go about life for a year without riding the bus. The bus company actually lost money during this time period and tried to have the boycott stopped (I didn't actually understand how that would have worked, would they have forced people onto the bus and then taken their money?). It was crazy too how few demands the boycotters had: bus drivers had to be polite to bus riders, there must be a fixed dividing line for white/black segregation, people must be seated on a first come first serve basis, and the bus company must higher black drivers for routes through the black neighbourhoods. They didn't even ask for desegregation of the buses at that point! Rather than give into their demands though, there were efforts to shut down the make shift taxi service, people lost their jobs and others were beaten and even killed.
After the Rosa Parks museum we did a walking tour of the city and of all things we found the first white house of the Confederate States as well as the first white house of Jefferson Davies. At the capitol they had the spot where Davies made his inaugural address marked with a star. It's a strange juxtaposition of civil war and civil rights history intermingling so much in one city.
Uniquely, someone decided that this state capitol should be made in the Greek revival style. Also, the Confederate government ruled from here briefly after the southern states seceded.
From Montgomery we made our way north. We intended to stay at a state park just outside of Guntersville, but we hadn't done our research very well. Coming up on the city things started to look a little strange, all of the hotels along the way were jam packed. As we got into the more wooded areas we could just make out in our headlights fallen trees along the way. By the time we got to state campsite it was obvious that we were in the area that had been affected by the tornadoes a few weeks previous. The state park was closed. Every other campsite was also closed and when we finally gave up on the idea of camping we were lucky to find the last available room in Scottsboro.
The next morning we woke up and hurried to our destination for the day... the Unclaimed Baggage Store. The idea of this store is that if there is luggage that is unclaimed, or maybe gets lost, it is sent to this store where the contents are sold off. When I originally heard of this store I got pretty excited. When we were visiting Jaci and Larry we had watched a t.v. show called Storage Wars in which people bid on the contents of storage lockers which hadn't been paid for. The people only got a cursory examination of the contents and hoped to find some treasure buried underneath. I had envisioned a similar thing for the unclaimed baggage store. I figured we would bid on an unopened piece of luggage and maybe inside there would be a treasure of some kind, maybe artwork, or really rare comic books or something else that would fit inside luggage and be worth alot. I would even have been happy with laptop, or a fold up bike. Anyway, these daydreams were crushed when I found out that, in fact, the unclaimed baggage is all opened, sorted and displayed like a department store. After perusing the aisles for a bit I was pretty much as bored as I am when I have to go to the Bay. We did find some good deals though, I got a few books by authors I have been meaning to read and Meg got a cute hat and some jeans that look really nice on her. The other fun part of the store is wondering how things ended up there. Aside from the clothes and books and what not that you could just replace if you lost it, there were things like laptops and smart phones which would be a real pain to lose. Probably the strangest things though were the wedding dresses! What the heck is going on that women aren't picking those up.
Me stoked to claim some (possibly YOUR) unclaimed baggage.
Someone decided not to claim this puppet from Labyrinth. Had it been for sale, I may have picked up a new co-pilot (Meg of course would still be with me, just in the back seat).
Scottsboro was a one hit wonder kind of town, so after checking out the unclaimed luggage we were back on the road again. This time up to Lynchburg, Tennessee, the home of Jack Daniels. The drive up that way was absolutely beautiful! Tennessee in general is a really pretty state, they have huge, huge deciduous trees that seem to cover much of the state in a green blanket. Around Lynchburg there are nice rolling hills dotted with farm houses, farmland and the occasional cow peacefully grazing up to it's belly in grass. The JD tour was informative (I have never gone through a distillery before)and the distillery was well maintained and fun to walk through. There was also a new museum of sorts which told the whole history of the company. Evidently it is the longest running official distillery in the US (I think the official bit comes in as JD was the first to apply for a license when the government started regulating/taxing distilleries). The only downside of the tour is that you can't try any of the whiskey because the county is dry, in fact a special law had to be passed in 1995 to allow the distillery to sell the whiskey on site. Meg and I hummed and hawed a bit about buying a bottle until we came to the realization that neither of us liked it. Since we could only buy big bottles at the store, it seemed like a big investment just for the novelty of it. The town of Lynchburg is quite cute, but we quickly ran out of interest when we realized that every store is selling the same junky Jack Daniels branded merchandise. It wasn't all that junky actually, we just didn't want it.
Me in front of one of four Lynchburg store fronts.
Meg and Jack, and then me in the background. I feel I look like a third wheel in this picture.
The actual well where Helen Keller learned "water". I am not sure whether Meg is supposed to be touching it.
We also visited the birthplace of W.C. Handy. I am going to be honest, I had no idea who the guy was, I had just heard his name in that song by Marc Cohn "...W.C. Handy won't you look down over me, yeah I got a first class ticket but I'm as blue as a boy can be..." Anyway we got there, and the lady tours us around a bit and is telling us this and telling us that about W.C. Handy's upbringing and at one point I just had to stop her and ask, "so, what is W.C. Handy so famous for?" It turns out he is the considered the father of the blues. Not because he invented the blues apparently, but because he was the first fellow to record an album with the word "blues" in the title. So that was great, there we were in the birthplace of the father of the blues. But not really, because the house was moved from it's original location, the layout had been changed and the furniture was not his. The logs were the same logs from the original home though, which was pretty cool as W.C. Handy's grandfather had hewed the logs himself and you could see the adze marks. For lunch that day we went out, a nice change from the daily regimen of peanut butter and honey sandwiches that Meg subjects me to. Everyone in town was really stoked on this little restaurant down in the park so we went to check it out. Most of the women also insisted that Meg try the chicken salad (I guess guys don't eat salads down here). In my head when I heard chicken salad, I figured there was some kind of salad with a chicken breast on top. I think partly my ignorance stems from the fact that growing up I never ate chicken salad sandwiches. Actually I can still remember my repulsion when I saw a chicken salad sandwich as an adult. So I was amazed when the chicken salad came and it was the same as the sandwich, just with no bread. How is that even a salad?! I found it all a little strange. I mean the whole town just loves the way this restaurant combines chopped up chicken and mayonnaise?
After cruising the towns for a few hours we were off again. This time onto the birthplace of Rock n' Roll, Memphis, Tennessee!
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