We discovered Todd Farms, just north of town. While in his 70's, Mr. Todd decided to learn how to make cane syrup the way some of his ancestors did in the 1800's. So he planted some sugar cane, and refurbished the equipment necessary to mash the cane and then cook up enough syrup for his family and close friends.
Word got out that he was making this old-fashioned treat, and last year they bottled 10,000 jars to sell in their store. They had a film production team from South Carolina's public television come to the farm to interview Mr. Todd about the process of making syrup. We watched the well-made video, and then Mrs. Todd took us on a tour of the farm. It would include seeing the giant syrup cooking pot (above) and the largest collection of cane presses in the world (below).
While Mr. Todd was collecting cane presses, Mrs. Todd got interested in finding old syrup pitchers. The picture below includes less than half of her collection.
It was a factory tour on a smaller scale, but we so enjoyed getting to meet both of the Todds. It also included samples of all their products, and we bought a jar of pure cane syrup to take home. We'll report on uses of it later.
Sugar cane isn't a big crop around Dothan, but peanuts are. In fact, 65% of all peanuts grown in the United States are grown within 100 miles of here. So naturally the peanut is the Dothan mascot. There is a map available from the visitor center that showed all the places in town that host a uniquely decorated peanut. We found the Elvis peanut and took a picture.
Since 1938, Dothan has hosted the national peanut festival. It started with Dr. George Washington Carver as the first speaker, and now 150,000 people attend the festival every October. After posing with Elvis peanut, Denisa is now posing in the shadow of the world's biggest peanut at the national peanut festival grounds.
With all this talk about food, we needed to get some exercise. We discovered two different bike trails in Dothan. The visitor center told us about a brand new trail called, "Forever Wild" and we rode the 1.5 loop trail twice. At the same site there was also a "pump trail" that looked like fun with its hills and moguls and sloped curves.
So of course we had to make several loops on the pump trail as well.
The second bike trail encircles Westgate park, and winds through the forested area surrounding soccer fields, the water park, baseball diamonds, etc.
It was a unique mix of walking and biking trails that are together at times, and then split off into separate trails at other junctions.
It was a partly cloudy day, with delightful temperatures for riding bikes on a forested trail. The picture below provides a shot of that sky, but was totally unintentional. It happened when Mark was fumbling with his camera to get one of those trail action shots. As the camera hit the trail, it took a picture of the sky. (Public service announcement - No cameras were harmed in the making of this blog.)
Also in Westgate park is a BMX bike track. The big brother of the pump trail we had ridden earlier, we would have definitely tried this track if it hadn't been padlocked.
We also walked through the Dothan Botanical Gardens, but wouldn't recommend it. After being immersed in the azaleas at their peak bloom all over Alabama, the gardens had nothing to compare. We also wouldn't recommend the George Washington Carver Museum. We had hoped to learn more about this black scientist that did so much for the peanut industry, but the video wasn't working, and the rest of the museum centered instead on black history events. Mark did some trouble-shooting on their video problems, and thought about staying to make sure they got it working again.
But we had some shopping to do. People that live in a motor home do very little shopping except for food to eat. But we needed some things, and a city of 68,409 people plays host to all the big box stores and a mall. So after a day of shopping we came home with our purchases. It might not look like much, but this is more purchases than we have made in all of the previous 14 months put together.
But the biggest project of the day was shopping for a hair cut. Denisa's least favorite part of living on the road is having to find a new place to get her hair cut every time. In a very unscientific process she ended up in a random chair, entrusting her hair happiness to a complete stranger. We were obviously breaking our rules of finding a stylist with a similar hair cut to trust with her conservative cut.
Stay tuned for future blogs to see how our final Dothan purchase turned out.
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