Dixie Sojourn - February 9-15

Tuesday February 9th

We truly switched to vacation mode today: doing puzzles and reading books. The only thing missing is a good view: we have a parking lot full of mudspattered trucks and an interstate behind that! Had a nice visit to the Mobile Museum of Art. They have a decent permanent collection and had a very good temporary exhibit of modern African-American art curated by an artist named David Driskell. He studied in Skowhegan at one time and summers in Maine. Diane Bennekamper and Lorraine Martin introduced David and his wife to us over a lovely dinner ten years ago.

Wednesday February 10th

Back to sightseeing. Drove to Pensacola, FL to see three units of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. The first is a grove of Live Oaks which John Quincy Adams set aside for naval shipbilding. A great place for a walk. Ft. Dickens is at the end of Pensacola Beach: we drove along a road with beautiful white sand drifting over it to get there. After a great meal of shrimp at Pegleg Pete's, we headed to the Naval Air Station to visit Ft. Barrancas. We had another good walk here. All pilots we knew in Brunswick did their original training here: Navy, Marine and Coast Guard. This was a great day except that Grandpa took a slow road home.

Thursday February 11th
Another tourist day. We zipped over to Biloxi and had a nice tour of Jeffferson Davis' home. It was hit hard by Katrina, but is being well restored. The camellias were blooming despite the cold. In the South you are constantly reminded of the wound the Civil War represented to our body politic. We also found a really good seashell shop and went wild. In Ocean Springs we visited another unit of the Gulf Islands National Seashore (Grandpa has all five stamps), but cut short a walk due to sleet. We ate a decadent cupcake in town where the owner told her tale of two weeks without power during Katrina (and she lived 100 miles inland).

Friday February 12th
SNOW in Mobile. All around they delared snow days although none of it stuck to the ground since it was 39 degrees. We drove to Hank Aaron Memorial Stadium to see the house where he grew up - it's been moved to the ball field and will be a small museum. This evening we went to our third Mardi Gras parade. Grandma now has a rule that Grandpa can only keep items that are thrown directly at him. He now has over 100 bead necklaces and Judy has 3 big stuffed animals and a couple of dozen moon pies. It was a small crowd due to the cold weather.

Saturday February 13th

Off to New Orleans where we crawled through town on the Interstate. The combination of the Super Bowl victory and Mardi Gras has the place hopping. The local TV stations give live coverage to all the dozens of parades and balls. We headed to the Barataria Preserve, part of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park. It has a great boardwalk through a swamp. These bayous are considered is a sportsman's paradise. We chiefly saw birds and four muskrats having a great time. In Houma we had some genuine cajun food but the gumbo did not have okra in it. We won't tell Clara Jacobs.

Sunday February 14th

After early mass we headed to Oak Alley, a nice plantation on the Mississippi with a spectacular drive shaded by twenty-eight 300 year old live oaks. It was finally a warm sunny day. The family lost the plantation because of the mother's spending habits. We unwisely ventured on to Baton Rouge for a pleasant visit to their zoo, which meant a late drive home. A really great Mexican meal restored spirits until it took us an hour and a half to drive fifteen miles back to our motel as we followed two Mardi Gras floats being taken somewhere with a police esciort that would not let us pass (period). This whole part of the country is Mardi Gras crazy. Many towns have parades every day, and the bigger cities have several a day. Drew Brees was a parade marshall today. Heaven has come to New Orleans.

Monday Febraury 15th

Today we learned the difference between Cajun and Creole culture as we visited an Acadian Cultural Center in Lafayette and two Creole Cane River plantations near Natchitoches, both NPS sites. The Cajuns are the folk who came from Nova Scotia when the English kicked them out, the Evangeline story. Creole, although we connect the word with Haiti, actually referred to people who were born in the New World including natives of Louisiana. We hope to continue our research with a Cajun meal tonight.

Dixie Sojourn - February 5-8

February 5
Our Alabama adventures have begun. The weather has remained cloudy, cool, and showery, but today we visited three National Park sites. We began with the Little River Preserve where the recent rains have turned the river into a torrent. The canyon is about 450 feet deep and every conceivable waterfall was showing itself off. In the afternoon we visited Horseshoe Bend where, in March of 1814, Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee militia with Cherokee and Creek allies defeated over 1,000 "Red Stick" Creek warriors who, inspired by Tecumseh, were seeking to drive the white settlers out of the historic Creek homelands. The NPS movie told the story very well. We could picture the grim battle in some detail. Then we headed to the airport at Tuskegee where over 1,000 Black airmen were trained during WWII. It is a fitting place for the Monument since Macon County, Alabama, which surrounds Tuskegee, is 83% African-American. We spent the night close to Auburn University. The owner of the Outback Restaurant told us that the Alabama-Auburn rivalry is really fierce. He thinks that most of the folk who have not been to college pull for Alabama. There are a lot of Alabama souvenirs for sale in every grocery and convenience store.
February 6
We had a nice visit to the George Washington Carver museum on the Tuskegee University campus. Booker T. Washington hired Carver, and their stories are really very inspiring. This is also an NPS site, and the young ranger on duty had played football at Morningside College in Si0ux City, Iowa before transferring to Tuskegee. We took pictures of the graves of both of these great men. A quick hop to Mongomery took us to the State Capitol where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President of the Confederacy. He marched down Dexter Avenue to the new song, "Dixie". Ironically the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church is a block from the Capitol, and it was there that the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott was organized under the leadership of its new young pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr. The Selma to Montgomery March came up the same street in 1965. We drove half way to Selma to visit the Lowndes County center where the NPS tells the story of that march. It is a grim reminder of how vicious segregation was. On that very spot a tent city was erected for sharecroppers who had been evicted by their white landowners simply because they registered to vote. In 1960 not one of the 5,000 African-Americans in that county was registered to vote.
February 7
We took advantage of the quietness of Super Bowl Sunday to go downtown to explore the neighborhoods of Mobile. It is a very Southern city with its live oaks draped in Spanish moss and great mansions a few blocks from abject poverty. We were impressed by the
quality and honesty of the Museum of the City of Mobile. It faced slavery and segregation unflinchingly. Bill went to a 5:00 service in a little storefront church being started by a former English professor who was ordained as an Amer. Baptist and called to Mobile as a Southern Baptist pastor. The Southern Baptists disfellowshipped that congregation for calling her. The congregation stood by her, but understood when she moved to the UCC to start her own congregation. She is a strong preacher and a good pastor. We went back downtown for two Mardi Gras parades and returned loaded with trinkets. The riders on the floats bombard the crowd with moon pies (a graham cracker and marshmallow treat), beads, cups, toys, and stuffed animals. Bill caught 69 necklaces. Judy got 4 stuffed animals plus cups, toys and moon pies. People here eat rice and beans and moon pies for their Super Bowl parties. Mardi Gras was actually observed here before it was observed in New Orleans. Everyone here is excited about the outcome of the Super Bowl.

February 8
Today we had more sun and the temperature hit 60 briefly. 65 is the normal high this time of year, and all the locals complain about how hard the winter has been with lots of rain and cold weather - temperatures in the 40's. We visited the Bellingrath Gardens and found them to be very lovely with lots of camillias, daffodils, pansies, etc. We also toured Dauphin Island and Fort Gaines where Admiral Farragut said, "Damn the torpedos; full speed ahead." Mostly Judy has worshipped the sun today. Rain is in tonight's forecast again.

Dixie Sojourn - February 2009

Feb. 1 A cold, but sunny day. We drove straight to Easton, PA where we visited the Crayola Factory, not really a factory, but a well done tourist trap which we think the Truckenmillers would like. It was closed, but the Crayola store was open. We began working on our southern diet with an afternoon stop for Shoo Fly pie and biscuits and honey for dinner.

Feb. 2 On the road by 7:15. We had seen virtually no snow in PA. But today we saw snow from MD south to Knoxville. After two hours of good driving we ran into snow for the next 250 miles. Due to the weather we did absolutely no sightseeing. We had a quiet night reading J.D. Robb's Death series novels.

Feb 3 Bright but nippy day. Eventually it made it up to 47 degrees in Chattanooga. We were at the Chickamauga Battlefield by 11:00. Took two good walk through the actual battle lines with their multiple monuments. Then we set out for Missionary Ridge, but found it to be a crowded residential district and left after we tracked down the Iowa Monument. We made our way to Lookout Mountain, which is still cleaning up after a bad ice storm. After a stop at the New York monument we made it to Point Park, which we last visited in 1977 with our three daughters and Jan Garlock. It is still a most dramatic sight - to look over the Tennessee River valley from so high up. And, it does not seem possible that soldiers actually fought their way up this hill and won the battle.

We ate a a Mexican chain which is new to us, Qdoba. Like a Mexican Subway. Quite good. Bill finished the first novel in the Death series. Checked with the Henricksons: Albert's carpel tunnel surgery went well.

Feb. 4 A dreary day turned to rain at noontime, and continued all the rest of the day. Temp's in the low 40's, about ten degrees below normal. We drove to Alabama to visit Bill's 300th NS site, a cave where several millennia of Indians dwelt. We had a good hike up the hill above the cave. Then Bill tried a classic mountain road, less and less well maintained until we got over the mountain. Regular gas at a truck stop in Georgia was $2.42. We made a brief visit to the Chattanooga Choo Choo (which we had also done in '77). Quiet afternoon - followed by an overdose of ribs, pork, beans, potato salad and banana pudding at Sugar's Ribs.

We are truly having a vacation.