Friday, August 10, 2012

Alabama and Mississippi

Sigh... So, tomorrow night is our last one away, and I'm just getting started on Day 1. Shoot me. I'm tired.

We woke up at 2:18am on Day 1... 2 minutes before the alarm went off thank-you-very-much-A. We finally left town around 3:30am (half an hour after we meant to) because it was too early to think.

Dude. We made amazing time, though. We were in Georgia before 11am. Thank goodness for car DVD players. This was our longest travel day this year!

Alabama greeted us with a very cool "Now entering Central Time Zone" sign, which I totally appreciated, even though I keep thinking to myself, "It's really ___ at home," as if wondering whether our cat is on schedule.

Our Alabama activity was the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery. We technically went on two tours here... a "kids" tour where a robot bus driver guided you from before the Civil War to just before Rosa's infamous bus ride and the regular tour that covered the day of her arrest. The kids loved the robot bus ride and came away impressed with Rosa's bravery.

The museum building is on the site of the theatre in front of which she was arrested. It was surreal to stand in that very spot.



From there, we drove down the street past the State Capitol and could not believe how little traffic was in this downtown area. Did every have the day off?

We closed out the day with Gigi's cupcakes. I've never seen so much icing on a cake. None of us could eat it all, but YUM.

Day 2 started with a compared-to-day-1 short trip with a stop in Biloxi. We wanted to step foot in the Gulf of Mexico, and, man, was that water warm! The sand was white and soft, too. The kids totally wanted to full-on play in the water, and I can't blame them, but it would have been a huge hassle to bring a bunch of beach towels and toys with everything else, so we settled for a bit of water, a lighthouse, and walking on the pier.

The beaches were almost empty for summer, and there really didn't seem (to us) to be as much as there should have been in a tourist area. Much of what was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina still hasn't been rebuilt, so there are a lot of empty lots. That's really sad 7 years later!

We had a great lunch at Margaritaville and spent (lost) a little money in the casino there, but it was a needed break from being in the car.

After lunch, we pointed the way towards New Orleans.

I'll give Louisiana it's own post...

No comments: