The Drive up I-65

No where (that I can think of, yet) embodies the elements necessary to scare the shit out of a Yankee visiting the state of Alabama than a drive along I-65 North from Montgomery to the state line of Tennessee. It has just about everything you could ask for, from the Confederate battle flag to Religious fundamentalism to outright hatred of democrats.

Good lord, I nearly shit my pants everytime I drive it.

Tuskegee Adventure

Tuskegee is famous for a lot of different things. The Tuskegee Institute and George Washington Carver. The birthplace of Rosa Parks. The Tuskegee Airmen. Tuskegee University.

We had the opportunity to visit one day, lured by the promise of Sweet Potatoes and a celebration of George Washington Carver at the Farmer's Market there.

Unfortunately, the Sweet Potato Festival was a complete and total bust. We arrived to a practically empty Farmer's Market (save for a few farmers), and a small table manned by a few schoolgirls and their handmade signs about what Carver did with sweet potatoes. It was a sad, but amusing sight. The girls had a small microphone and gave a short presentation on all the great things Carver did. It was like I was back in elementary school listening to classmates give book reports in the front of class.

"George Washington Carver was a great man. He was a scientist, and studied sweet potatoes. He raised them in his garden....He was a great man."

You get the idea.

It's my birthday!

And to celebrate, the wife and I went down the Gulf of Mexico and the Redneck Riviera! (Seriously, they themselves call it that, so I can too. So, there.)

Anyway...

Perdidio Key is southwest of Pensacola and a part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. The drive from Auburn took about 4 hours, but that's only because Google maps had us take the Blue Angels Parkway, a one lane road that could have been avoided by going the way we went home (along the 110 into...oh, wait. I just realized I am doing that thing that my adult male relatives do after they've arrived somewhere. That's another post at another time.) We headed straight for a bar that I'd heard of from people both here and in Connecticut. The Flora-bama

The carnival

Good god, what a shithole. It strattles the Florida - Alabama border on the beach, and is an amalgamation of tents, coverings, wood platforms, and other assorted crap glued and screwed together to somehow pass code. It's a classic hole in the wall bar, as evidenced by a shot I took of the inside to the right.


See what I mean?

There are other "areas" that are all sort of cobbled together. You have multiple stages for performers to set up on, so forth and so on, and lots of individual bar stations. One thing I did notice was that there weren't too many TV sets, which was nice. Nothing I hate more when I go to a bar is to have nothing to look at except TV's.

Oh, and did you notice what was hanging from the clotheslines up there? Here's a better picture.

"Oh look, there's mine!"

Lots and lots of bras. Gives the place character and class, doesn't it?

Since we hit this place up right around lunchtime, we weren't expecting it to be crazy. But as evidenced by the underwear, clearly good times had been had here.

As it was lunch time, oysters and fish po-boys had to be eaten.

Yes, please!

After lunch we headed back to the beach and laid out on the beautiful, white sand beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. And they truly were stunning, until you walked up and down the beach and saw the oil response clean-up teams, their equipment, and tar-balls. Lots of little tar-balls.

The following show the tar stained beach and the equipment used by the teams:

Tractors and other "stuff"

Crews getting ready to hit the beach

Used sand sifters. Not small enough to get the majority if the tar balls if you ask me

Oil stained sand

Lovely, right? Sigh.

Pack? check. Beer? check. It's dark. Let's go!

You may also have noticed me with a backpack on my shoulders. That's because the wife and I camped on the beach on Saturday, and we had to hike in about a mile to get to where we were allowed to stay on Perdido Key (the photo was taken Sunday morning on the way out). But here's me gearing up ready to make the trek out at night.

And here we are in the morning after a not so great sleep (due to lack of pillows, a thermarest with a hole in it (grrr.....), hellacious temperature and humidity, and lack of breeze through the floor of the tent (which will be remedied on the next tent purchase.))

Good morning!

Sunday saw us stopping off at the IHOP for breakfast, driving to Pensacola Beach for the, well, beach, and then to the Pensacola Art Museum for a little bit of afternoon culture. Incidentally, the museum has a very nice collection, which we would have seen if they weren't playing a movie about Marc Chagall at the same time we visited.  :-(  Oh well.

We traveled back to Auburn after the museum and drove through a pretty horrendous thunderstorm, one that had a lighting strike right next to our car and which sounded like a shotgun! Fun stuff! It was f'ing terrifying, but, we were alright. Just a little rattled.

All in all: Great trip, glad we went, and we'll certainly go again when it gets a little cooler.

Late night Mud-riding

I was thinking I really should have pictures for this post, but I don't think they would capture the thrill of barreling down a dirt road in the middle of the night. How do you express the joy of riding a roller coaster to someone through words or pictures? It somehow doesn't do the experience justice, and I certainly want to give the proper props to this.

It's late. It's the middle of the night. You're in Alabama, and there's several acres of woods with a"road" cleared out through them, leading to a pond in the middle. The road is the red clay of the South, not gravel or asphalt. Now, you've gone off-roading before, when you were growing up, living in Connecticut. But it somehow doesn't live up to what you think you are about to do, because, let's face it: You're a stranger in a strange country, and you've placed blind faith in a person you've just met because they told you to get in the truck and not to ask questions. You're going for a ride, and that's about all you know.

You drive down the road, and turn off, facing the "road" that goes straight into the woods. The driver puts the peddle to the metal and away you go, flying torwards trees before the wheel is turned and you're faced with another set, the headlights illuminating just what's directly in front of you and nothing else. You hit the clearing where the pond is, stop, pile out of the truck and look up at the moon, and all the stars, and listen to the silence, something you haven't heard in a long time because of the years you've spent living in New York City, or Bridgeport, CT, the drone of I-95 constantly in the background.

And it's here that you thank yourself for trusting people, for believing that people are inherently good, and that you've missed the woods, the stars, and the silence.