Christmas Day - Memphis
Paul Here: We finally said good bye to cousins and pulled out of Atlanta on Monday, December 19, and headed south with the goal of getting through crazy Atlanta rush hour traffic before the end of the day (we tend to get going slowly in the morning and kept finding things to do--like buying plane tickets to Mexico). Suburban Atlanta traffic is huge.
Once we got south of Atlanta it started to feel like a whole different region. We stopped to buy speakers at some auto parts stores in Jackson, GA. Since we finally had a car stereo installed, it was time to replace the junked out speakers. No speakers would really be big enough out back to get through the ear plugs that Ruth and whichever lucky kid are wearing when they're riding back there.
We spent the night at Indian Springs State Park which was nearly deserted. Larry the campground volunteer welcomed us at his site, and shared that his monster rig got 10 miles to the gallon, and all of a sudden the extra 2 to 4 miles per gallon we were getting in our sardine can didn't seem very attractive or necessary. It was still too cold to hook up the water, but the park had a decent shower and bathroom.
Miles was tempted by the sulpher spring water that locals travel far and wide to collect. He swore it tasted OK even though it reeked of rotten eggs.
Tuesday, we were finally on our way to ....... Plant Sherer, the largest coal fired power plant in the United States! (It was my idea.) On our way, after another late rollout, we needed lunch and I happened to see a sign for the Whistle Stop Cafe. Yup! Right out of "Fried Green Tomatoes" in Juliette, Georgia. Naturally, we had to order fried green tomatoes and enjoyed a meal there and watched the empty, 2-mile long coal trains heading north back to Gillette, Wyoming.
We finally made it to the power plant and were provided with a very generous tour. We were dwarfed by the two 1,000 foot smoke stacks and the 4 enormous cooling towers. We ended up on the roof, inside the plant on many levels, and even got to see in one of the burners in action. The numbers are staggering, but basically, it takes a messload of coal, to be transferred a really long distance, to make a bunch of electricity for a lot of people. Better stats can be found at: http://www.southerncompany.com/gapower/about/pdf/Plant%20Sherer%20Brochure.pdf
There's also a decent kids interactive "how electricity works" site at: http://www.southerncompany.com/learningpower/home.asp?mnuOpco=soco&mnuType=lp&mnuItem=oc
Don't worry, the control room is a full scale simulation for training purposes. They don't let casual passersby in the real control room.
We spent Tuesday night on the west side of the state at FDR State Park. There were more RV's there and a few of them had Christmas lights, outdoor decorations, campfires, and loud Christmas carols on the boom box.
Wednesday "morning" on to Tuskegee, Alabama with a stop at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site. http://www.nps.gov/tuai/ The site is still in its early stages with the visitors center set up in portable buildings, but it tells an impressive story and drives home how amazing the folks were who fought hard to get into the military only to be treated brutally once they got home despite their status as war heroes.
We ate lunch at a Taco Bell/KFC combo joint and got our first dose of southern fast food mentality (somehow our regular visits to Subway prior to this had been different). The lunch break had an impact on Miles, who didn't want to hang out too long.
On to the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site http://www.nps.gov/tuin/ to learn about Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. To put it mildly, those two guys were amazing!
Miles and Jill are standing in front of an Iron Lung used for polio treatment. Polio victims came to Tuskegee Institute for peanut oil massages among other treatments.
Time to head west. For the record: The Good Sam Club endorsed campground at the truck stop at Shorter, Alabama was misrepresented. Here's the deal. Miles had been aching for me to turn the water on in the camper since Day 1 of the trip, and I had been pushing back because of the overnight freezing temperatures that would burst pipes. (I already replaced a burst water heater tank that made it passed my pre-purchase inspection.) Shorter seemed like the place to try the water, but just in case, the truck stop/campground staff told us that the campground bath house was working fine. Nope, their water was turned off and the toilet was plugged up. But not to worry, we'd have our own water in our rig that night. Except that...after hooking up the sewer line, draining lots of anti-freeze out of the system, and pressuring up the system with water did I discover that our toilet was spraying water all over the inside of our bathroom--and me! You see, it didn't really blow out until the pressure was good and strong and assured that I would get soaked. After a second attempt, with water dripping from our gills, we got a refund from the campground and sought out a hotel in Montgomery.
I used a computer at Kinko's that night and got to weigh the pros and cons of not traveling with a laptop. Pros: nothing to lose or have stolen; no purchase price (maybe I should have invested the savings in an RV toilet); and forced quality time among the 4 of us instead of any of us "disappearing" into computer land. Cons: less writing, journaling, blogging etc. than possible; little time for multiple voices; and a little bit of stress getting caught up on computer needs like banking and blogging (I'm typing like a fiend right now in a hotel business center while Ruth and the kids are asleep).
Lo and behold, in our hotel room in suburban Montgomery, our cell phone rang at 6 a.m. and it was my buddy, Siafa, in Monrovia, Liberia. (How was he to know we were now in a different time zone?) It was the second time on the trip that he had called in, and it's always a bit of a surprise. More Liberian connections coming.
The hotel also provided us with our first view of the innovative hotel lobby waffle maker. I wish I had thought of it!
Downtown Montgomery was superb and we would love to return someday. So much history happened there. In the process of getting lost walking around, we ended up in the Alabama State Archives building asking for directions. The volunteer was so happy to see anyone that he gave us all kinds of information and encouraged us to look around the building. Well, for one thing, the building is made out of Alabama marble. I didn't know they had marble in Alabama. For another thing, I smelled Pork Barrel politics since the huge Archives building didn't get built in the early 1900's until a US Senator from Alabama secured the federal funding. Otherwise, they had a great kids area, and a moving display about Bloody Sunday, the first attempted Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
Next we were at Jefferson Davis's first White House of the Confederacy. Ol' Jefferson Davis was quite the man and had been quite the public servant to the US before becoming president of the confederacy.
Next we were in the state capitol, and my casually remark to the first person we met there was: "I don't expect everyone who works here to be a historian, but I've got a question." Turns out the guy I was talking to had a Doctorate in History and was ready to share all kinds of stuff. He'd been a young black man who marched in Bloody Sunday and the following Selma to Montgomery march and later traveled the world as an Air Force pilot. The capitol was impressive, with a wild double spiral staircase and a traveling Smithsonian exhibit on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but we were running out of time.
The star at the capitol is where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president and where Martin Luther King stood to address the thousands of people who gathered at the end of the successful Selma to Montgomery march.
Time to hit the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center. http://www.splcenter.org/center/crmc/civil.jsp It's a very impressive building designed by Maya Lin. It was also the only site we had visited with intense security measures because of the fairly recent threats it had received. As the historian at the capitol said, "Most Americans got their first dose of terrorism on 9-11. Black southerners grew up with terrorism." (He also compared George W. to George Wallace, Hoo-yah!)
Finally had to head out of Montgomery north to Oak Mountain State Park south of Birmingham and got our first dose of Hurricane Katrina. The campground was 92% booked by FEMA-sponsored evacuees in travel trailers. How can you tell a FEMA trailer? It's got a huge propane tank out front, it's got a permanent PVC sewer line hooked up with expanding foam sprayed around the hole in the ground, it's sitting on cinder blocks, and the folks who live in them aren't walking to the community bath house in the cold morning, because unlike some chumps from Vermont, their toilets work!
A semi-permanent camper/trailer park also presented a very different view of a State Park, complete with a police car, fire truck, and ambulance roaring up to the camper next to ours in the morning. I could see the person was still alive on the stretcher as I walked back from the bath house.
In Birmingham we decided to ease up on the violence and protest of the civil rights struggle that had been pounded into our kids' heads and visited Rickwood Field instead. http://www.ballparkreviews.com/birm/rickwood.htm This minor league ballpark was used by both white and colored baseball teams and had some unusual ways of accommodating the different races. For instance, when the colored teams played, the whites sat in the right field bleachers, and when the white teams played the blacks sat in the right field bleachers.
In the afternoon, Ruth and the kids hit the McWane Center in downtown Birmingham http://www.mcwane.org/ a hands-on science center for kids. I got an oil change and ran errands.
Birmingham to Tupelo late Thursday afternoon was an uninteresting schlog. Route 78 is the future Interstate 22 and once again, political influence was evident. The road had multiple lanes, beautiful overpasses, exits, etc, despite passing through endless nothingness.
It was a big night at Tombigbee State Park outside Tupelo! I got the water turned on in our rig (sans toilet) and we washed dishes in our kitchen sink. (Sorry, no photos.) Just as well, since the skies opened up Saturday morning and revealed the leaks in our clothes storage cupboards. Info for a parlor trick: Tombigbee, pronounced tomBICKbee is Chickasaw for coffin makers.
In addition to our clothes the pouring rain dampened our enthusiasm for getting out in Tupelo at the birthplace of Elvis Aaron Presley and its accompanying chapel and museum (I worry who folks pray to at the chapel) but we did manage a drive-by.
Christmas Eve and Day in suburban Memphis at a Drury Inn. Hurray for Drury Inn with its outstanding afternoon Happy Hour, morning breakfast with prerequisite in-lobby waffle maker, heated pool and hot tub and free computer in the business center. And most importantly, situated at a location that even Santa Claus could find.
Christmas eve was spent briefly catching up with my old Liberian Peace Corps Supervisor, Coker George who lives nearby, and having a southern culture on the skids experience at the Waffle House next door. Poor Miles, he lost his appetite when the waitress begged him not to move his napkin because she didn't dare set the silverware directly on the table, and the guy 2 feet way from us with tattoos on his face and rolling and smoking his own cigarettes didn't help much either, despite the fact that just the day before had been his birf-day. It was also noteworthy to see how busy Waffle House was at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve. It was standing room only.
Today, Christmas Day, started with gifts under a "tree" that miraculously appeared in our hotel room over night, swimming in the pool, a load of laundry, and me reconciling our checkbook for the first time since leaving home.
We then joined Coker and his large family for a Christmas dinner in the afternoon. Great folks who made these weary travelers feel quite welcome.
Off to Little Rock and points west tomorrow morning (whatever that means).
(And another downside of batch processing at public computers: I don't spend a lot of time proofreading.)
Cheers!
Paul Here: We finally said good bye to cousins and pulled out of Atlanta on Monday, December 19, and headed south with the goal of getting through crazy Atlanta rush hour traffic before the end of the day (we tend to get going slowly in the morning and kept finding things to do--like buying plane tickets to Mexico). Suburban Atlanta traffic is huge.
Once we got south of Atlanta it started to feel like a whole different region. We stopped to buy speakers at some auto parts stores in Jackson, GA. Since we finally had a car stereo installed, it was time to replace the junked out speakers. No speakers would really be big enough out back to get through the ear plugs that Ruth and whichever lucky kid are wearing when they're riding back there.
We spent the night at Indian Springs State Park which was nearly deserted. Larry the campground volunteer welcomed us at his site, and shared that his monster rig got 10 miles to the gallon, and all of a sudden the extra 2 to 4 miles per gallon we were getting in our sardine can didn't seem very attractive or necessary. It was still too cold to hook up the water, but the park had a decent shower and bathroom.
Miles was tempted by the sulpher spring water that locals travel far and wide to collect. He swore it tasted OK even though it reeked of rotten eggs.
Tuesday, we were finally on our way to ....... Plant Sherer, the largest coal fired power plant in the United States! (It was my idea.) On our way, after another late rollout, we needed lunch and I happened to see a sign for the Whistle Stop Cafe. Yup! Right out of "Fried Green Tomatoes" in Juliette, Georgia. Naturally, we had to order fried green tomatoes and enjoyed a meal there and watched the empty, 2-mile long coal trains heading north back to Gillette, Wyoming.
We finally made it to the power plant and were provided with a very generous tour. We were dwarfed by the two 1,000 foot smoke stacks and the 4 enormous cooling towers. We ended up on the roof, inside the plant on many levels, and even got to see in one of the burners in action. The numbers are staggering, but basically, it takes a messload of coal, to be transferred a really long distance, to make a bunch of electricity for a lot of people. Better stats can be found at: http://www.southerncompany.com/gapower/about/pdf/Plant%20Sherer%20Brochure.pdf
There's also a decent kids interactive "how electricity works" site at: http://www.southerncompany.com/learningpower/home.asp?mnuOpco=soco&mnuType=lp&mnuItem=oc
Don't worry, the control room is a full scale simulation for training purposes. They don't let casual passersby in the real control room.
We spent Tuesday night on the west side of the state at FDR State Park. There were more RV's there and a few of them had Christmas lights, outdoor decorations, campfires, and loud Christmas carols on the boom box.
Wednesday "morning" on to Tuskegee, Alabama with a stop at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site. http://www.nps.gov/tuai/ The site is still in its early stages with the visitors center set up in portable buildings, but it tells an impressive story and drives home how amazing the folks were who fought hard to get into the military only to be treated brutally once they got home despite their status as war heroes.
We ate lunch at a Taco Bell/KFC combo joint and got our first dose of southern fast food mentality (somehow our regular visits to Subway prior to this had been different). The lunch break had an impact on Miles, who didn't want to hang out too long.
On to the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site http://www.nps.gov/tuin/ to learn about Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. To put it mildly, those two guys were amazing!
Miles and Jill are standing in front of an Iron Lung used for polio treatment. Polio victims came to Tuskegee Institute for peanut oil massages among other treatments.
Time to head west. For the record: The Good Sam Club endorsed campground at the truck stop at Shorter, Alabama was misrepresented. Here's the deal. Miles had been aching for me to turn the water on in the camper since Day 1 of the trip, and I had been pushing back because of the overnight freezing temperatures that would burst pipes. (I already replaced a burst water heater tank that made it passed my pre-purchase inspection.) Shorter seemed like the place to try the water, but just in case, the truck stop/campground staff told us that the campground bath house was working fine. Nope, their water was turned off and the toilet was plugged up. But not to worry, we'd have our own water in our rig that night. Except that...after hooking up the sewer line, draining lots of anti-freeze out of the system, and pressuring up the system with water did I discover that our toilet was spraying water all over the inside of our bathroom--and me! You see, it didn't really blow out until the pressure was good and strong and assured that I would get soaked. After a second attempt, with water dripping from our gills, we got a refund from the campground and sought out a hotel in Montgomery.
I used a computer at Kinko's that night and got to weigh the pros and cons of not traveling with a laptop. Pros: nothing to lose or have stolen; no purchase price (maybe I should have invested the savings in an RV toilet); and forced quality time among the 4 of us instead of any of us "disappearing" into computer land. Cons: less writing, journaling, blogging etc. than possible; little time for multiple voices; and a little bit of stress getting caught up on computer needs like banking and blogging (I'm typing like a fiend right now in a hotel business center while Ruth and the kids are asleep).
Lo and behold, in our hotel room in suburban Montgomery, our cell phone rang at 6 a.m. and it was my buddy, Siafa, in Monrovia, Liberia. (How was he to know we were now in a different time zone?) It was the second time on the trip that he had called in, and it's always a bit of a surprise. More Liberian connections coming.
The hotel also provided us with our first view of the innovative hotel lobby waffle maker. I wish I had thought of it!
Downtown Montgomery was superb and we would love to return someday. So much history happened there. In the process of getting lost walking around, we ended up in the Alabama State Archives building asking for directions. The volunteer was so happy to see anyone that he gave us all kinds of information and encouraged us to look around the building. Well, for one thing, the building is made out of Alabama marble. I didn't know they had marble in Alabama. For another thing, I smelled Pork Barrel politics since the huge Archives building didn't get built in the early 1900's until a US Senator from Alabama secured the federal funding. Otherwise, they had a great kids area, and a moving display about Bloody Sunday, the first attempted Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
Next we were at Jefferson Davis's first White House of the Confederacy. Ol' Jefferson Davis was quite the man and had been quite the public servant to the US before becoming president of the confederacy.
Next we were in the state capitol, and my casually remark to the first person we met there was: "I don't expect everyone who works here to be a historian, but I've got a question." Turns out the guy I was talking to had a Doctorate in History and was ready to share all kinds of stuff. He'd been a young black man who marched in Bloody Sunday and the following Selma to Montgomery march and later traveled the world as an Air Force pilot. The capitol was impressive, with a wild double spiral staircase and a traveling Smithsonian exhibit on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but we were running out of time.
The star at the capitol is where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president and where Martin Luther King stood to address the thousands of people who gathered at the end of the successful Selma to Montgomery march.
Time to hit the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center. http://www.splcenter.org/center/crmc/civil.jsp It's a very impressive building designed by Maya Lin. It was also the only site we had visited with intense security measures because of the fairly recent threats it had received. As the historian at the capitol said, "Most Americans got their first dose of terrorism on 9-11. Black southerners grew up with terrorism." (He also compared George W. to George Wallace, Hoo-yah!)
Finally had to head out of Montgomery north to Oak Mountain State Park south of Birmingham and got our first dose of Hurricane Katrina. The campground was 92% booked by FEMA-sponsored evacuees in travel trailers. How can you tell a FEMA trailer? It's got a huge propane tank out front, it's got a permanent PVC sewer line hooked up with expanding foam sprayed around the hole in the ground, it's sitting on cinder blocks, and the folks who live in them aren't walking to the community bath house in the cold morning, because unlike some chumps from Vermont, their toilets work!
A semi-permanent camper/trailer park also presented a very different view of a State Park, complete with a police car, fire truck, and ambulance roaring up to the camper next to ours in the morning. I could see the person was still alive on the stretcher as I walked back from the bath house.
In Birmingham we decided to ease up on the violence and protest of the civil rights struggle that had been pounded into our kids' heads and visited Rickwood Field instead. http://www.ballparkreviews.com/birm/rickwood.htm This minor league ballpark was used by both white and colored baseball teams and had some unusual ways of accommodating the different races. For instance, when the colored teams played, the whites sat in the right field bleachers, and when the white teams played the blacks sat in the right field bleachers.
In the afternoon, Ruth and the kids hit the McWane Center in downtown Birmingham http://www.mcwane.org/ a hands-on science center for kids. I got an oil change and ran errands.
Birmingham to Tupelo late Thursday afternoon was an uninteresting schlog. Route 78 is the future Interstate 22 and once again, political influence was evident. The road had multiple lanes, beautiful overpasses, exits, etc, despite passing through endless nothingness.
It was a big night at Tombigbee State Park outside Tupelo! I got the water turned on in our rig (sans toilet) and we washed dishes in our kitchen sink. (Sorry, no photos.) Just as well, since the skies opened up Saturday morning and revealed the leaks in our clothes storage cupboards. Info for a parlor trick: Tombigbee, pronounced tomBICKbee is Chickasaw for coffin makers.
In addition to our clothes the pouring rain dampened our enthusiasm for getting out in Tupelo at the birthplace of Elvis Aaron Presley and its accompanying chapel and museum (I worry who folks pray to at the chapel) but we did manage a drive-by.
Christmas Eve and Day in suburban Memphis at a Drury Inn. Hurray for Drury Inn with its outstanding afternoon Happy Hour, morning breakfast with prerequisite in-lobby waffle maker, heated pool and hot tub and free computer in the business center. And most importantly, situated at a location that even Santa Claus could find.
Christmas eve was spent briefly catching up with my old Liberian Peace Corps Supervisor, Coker George who lives nearby, and having a southern culture on the skids experience at the Waffle House next door. Poor Miles, he lost his appetite when the waitress begged him not to move his napkin because she didn't dare set the silverware directly on the table, and the guy 2 feet way from us with tattoos on his face and rolling and smoking his own cigarettes didn't help much either, despite the fact that just the day before had been his birf-day. It was also noteworthy to see how busy Waffle House was at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve. It was standing room only.
Today, Christmas Day, started with gifts under a "tree" that miraculously appeared in our hotel room over night, swimming in the pool, a load of laundry, and me reconciling our checkbook for the first time since leaving home.
We then joined Coker and his large family for a Christmas dinner in the afternoon. Great folks who made these weary travelers feel quite welcome.
Off to Little Rock and points west tomorrow morning (whatever that means).
(And another downside of batch processing at public computers: I don't spend a lot of time proofreading.)
Cheers!
posted by The Lambersons at 10:11 PM
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