Our camping spot at Gunter Hill is just 15 miles from Alabama's capitol, so we made several trips into the city. We might have been sleeping through history class when we were (much) younger, because we have certainly forgotten a lot of things in those history text books. But traveling around this country in a motor home is a great way to relearn it.
We'll start with Civil War sites, since Montgomery played an important role in the leadership of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy while standing on the front steps of the Alabama state capitol. That would be Mark standing on the capitol steps on the right, and a statue of Mr. Davis on a pedestal on the left.
The Davis family would move into the First White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery. It was called the "first white house" because they would later move to Richmond, Virginia, to be closer to the heart of the action.
We would continue inside the house, but not before Denisa sat and enjoyed the glorious azalea blooms out front.
This was a free stop in the city, so of course we would go inside. It was a great chance to see an authentically furnished home from the 1860's. The Davis family left many of their heirlooms to the group in Montgomery that bought and maintains this home.
That would include the Jefferson Davis family bible on the table, surrounded by his chairs.
It is amazing to us that famous Civil War locations are so close to famous Civil Rights locations. Here we are standing in front of the church that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pastored from 1954-1960, and we can see the Alabama capitol down the street.
Below is a picture of that Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. We found that the civil rights sites in Montgomery cost from $7.50 to $12.00 per person to go inside, so we were content to view them from the outside. We took the budget tour of the civil rights sites by enjoying the educational markers on the street.
On a blue-sky day, a three-mile walking trail through downtown Montgomery was like walking through the history books. We stood on the sidewalk right where Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1955. Soon after, the Montgomery bus boycott was organized at Dr. King's church. For 382 days, African-Americans did not use the city buses until the Supreme Court declared segregation on public transportation unconstitutional. In the meantime, the boycott almost bankrupted Montgomery's bus system.
Montgomery also plays host to the Civil Rights Memorial and Center. Another place we didn't go inside, but there are beautiful water features and memorials to see outside.
The same is true of the Greyhound Bus Station museum. We didn't pay the admission price to go inside, but outside there is a great time-line of events from the Freedom Riders incident in Montgomery on May 20, 1961. This page must have been missing in our history books because we don't remember ever hearing this story before.
Most of these civil rights events happened before we were born, and we feel like we have been insulated from this strife in Oklahoma. But living temporarily in Alabama has made us more aware of all things "civil" on our very educational tour!
We found out that Birmingham had heavy rain all weekend, so our timing for a road trip to Arkansas was perfect. We spent one more night at our campground outside of Birmingham, and one more walk to the lake to check on Mother Goose. Still no goslings!
Then we were on the road again towards Gunter Hill Corp of Engineers Campground outside of Montgomery, Alabama. We know that it is tough to find a campground for holiday weekends like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. We are also finding that it can be tough to find a place for spring break. In fact, all of the reservable sites at Gunter Hill were booked. But they have a few walk-in sites that were open on a first-come-first-served basis. We have found that changing campgrounds on a Monday gives us the advantage of finding a place right after the weekenders had to return to work. So we scored a nice place in a wooded area without a reservation even during spring break!
It took us a while to get level in our site, and I'm sure we were very entertaining while we went through the fiasco of adding leveling mats under the tires and jacks. Some of the folks we were entertaining were our new neighbors. A group of friends from Alabama met here for the week, and welcomed us into their campfire circle several nights.
They greeted us with gifts of a box of desserts and two colas. We were living a line out of the song, "Lifestyles of the Not so Rich and Famous." We have to hum along with the line from that song that poetically describes us, "Our champagne and caviar is a RC cola and a moon pie."
We would also enjoy a nice camp fire, and one of our favorite dinners--hot dogs and 8-marshmallow smores! Our new home is on the bend of Catoma Creek, and we hope to have the kayak on the water before we leave here.
We have been riding our bikes around the park as well, with a nice ride through the newly-budding forest.
This is the first time in our lives to spend a spring in a forest. We are finding that there is a price to pay for all this delicious shade. It's our first time to experience buckets of tree pollen. Our motor home and car are looking very yellow these days, covered with a layer of pollen. All this budding and blooming are sparked by unseasonably warm temperatures for March. We broke the record for the high temperature by 3 degrees as we hit 89 degrees one day.
Just as we are feeling very local as we suffer through the affects of the pollen, we are also sampling new local delicacies. We kept seeing fruit stands advertising "boiled peanuts," so of course we had to buy some. Obviously boiled in salt water, they are an interesting snack. Denisa popped open one peanut shell to show the transformed soft and salty nuts inside.
We also include a picture of another local. This lizard is thinking about hitching a ride to our next location, as he practices perching on our windshield wipers. Notice that beautiful yellow powdery pollen surrounding him on the windshield.
Now that we are settled into another campground, we are ready to explore the area around Gunter Hill.
Several weeks ago, our son's girl friend texted to say she wanted to take Blake on a surprise birthday trip in March. She thought it would be a great surprise for him to get to spend time with us, and of course we couldn't agree with her more! Her original plan was to drive him to where we were in Alabama. But we thought the 11 hour drive was too much to ask them to make on a weekend. So we offered to meet them half way. We left the motor home in Alabama, and drove the car six hours to meet them in Little Rock, Arkansas. Blake was speechless when they showed up to the restaurant that evening and his parents were there! Great job, Claire, he had no idea what you had planned for him!
We celebrated all weekend, starting with a slice of cheesecake that first evening.
We would follow that with playing games back at the hotel, and with more birthday dessert that Claire brought with her.
Arkansas has been pounded with rain for the last week, with more forecast for our weekend. But we got a surprising reprieve from the rain that allowed us to spend some time outside. They love to hike too, so we headed to Pinnacle Mountain State Park to hike the mountain.
It was misting as we started the ascent, so we had on our rain head gear to start the hike. The ranger suggested that we take the easier west trail to the top, given the muddy and slick conditions from the recent rain. You will notice from the picture above that we ignored that advice, and we are taking the more intense east trail to the top instead.
The first quarter of the trail was easy, with little elevation change and only mud to make it complicated. But the last three-quarters was a crawl over boulders to the top. Just to make it a little trickier, those rocks are slick and wet, and it was raining lightly now.
This would be a great time to wear a rain jacket, but we were working too hard and sweating too much to leave it on.
We made it to the summit in good time, and were treated to a view of the river valley below totally shrouded in clouds.
We had traveled to Little Rock, but today we hiked the "big rock" in the clouds!
Climbing up the harder side meant that we got to play more on the easier descent. Denisa is used to hiking with one goof ball, but this day she was blessed with two more fun hikers on the trail.
Blake is modeling the red foliage that reminded him of a friend's beard. We decided that he did look good in a beard.
We also thought these tree fungi looked like a row of potato chips, good enough to eat.
We had to remind Blake that we would feed him the Golden Flake potato chip samples we brought from Alabama, so he shouldn't eat the trail potato chips.
The misty rain stopped on our way down Pinnacle Mountain, and we even got a look at the valley below.
When we got to the bottom of the west trail, we still needed to hike around the base of the mountain to our car. Claire ran most of the base trail, as we finished up our five mile hike.
It was back to the hotel for more games and more birthday desserts. Then we explored some areas around Little Rock. Since we were into climbing today, there was the rope toy on the playground by the Arkansas River that flows through the city.
We also happened onto a St. Patrick's Day celebration downtown. The street was closed with a tent stretched between the businesses on both sides. Denisa is happy to report that one of the bands played some good two-step music. What would a St. Patrick's Day celebration be without some Irish music? We took this picture of the bagpipe band right before they took the stage. It's an interesting crowd when there are more men than women wearing skirts.
The next day we explored some more historic sites in Little Rock. The capitol building was locked up for the weekend, but we could take pictures standing in front of the golden front doors.
The Japanese magnolia trees are at peak bloom, and the ones just outside the capitol were just beautiful.
As full of blooms as they were, the ground was also covered with blooms that had already fallen. Denisa is certainly happy to be here with Blake and Claire! You would think we were celebrating her birthday, instead of Blake's.
We also got a picture of Mark with some of our favorite travelers.
We found that just a tap on the branches made it rain magnolia petals!
Also on the capitol grounds is a statue of "The Little Rock 9."
Today the Oklahoma 3 are reading the quotes from the Little Rock 9.
To learn more about the Little Rock 9, we traveled just a few blocks from the Capitol to the National Historic Site for Little Rock Central High School. This is the all-white high school that was forced into integration in September of 1957. Even though the Alabama governor ignored federal laws to integrate students in Little Rock, President Eisenhower would intercede. He enlisted the help of national troops to escort the 9 brave African American high school students into the school that day. There was a total of 1,200 troops in Little Rock for over a month, needed to control the crowds of angry patrons that were protesting on the school grounds.
The nine students would get national troop escort the first days of the academic year. But it was a tough time for those nine students, as they withstood the physical and verbal abuse the entire school year. In fact, all the high schools in Little Rock were closed the following year when the voters rejected the forced integration. A federal court order would re-open schools in 1959, with only a hand-full of African Americans brave enough to attend Central High School again.
But integration would finally happen in Little Rock, as evidenced by the following photo. It was interesting to talk to two men proudly taking pictures outside the high school this day. They were both drum majors of the band while they attended high school here in the early 1980's.
So we soaked up a little more cultural knowledge while we soaked up more birthday desserts. It was a great weekend, that ended in time for all of us to make our trips home in the opposite direction before severe weather hit Little Rock. We were blessed with good weather for our trip back to Alabama, and beautiful redbud trees bursting into bloom along the interstate.
We really enjoyed getting to spend time with our son and his girl friend. Claire, you did a great job of surprising Blake and blessing us all!
Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama, so that's probably why we found so many things to entertain us there. We made two more trips around town to see things that interested us. We also visited two different gardens in the city. We have found that walking through the gardens is great exercise on a beautiful day, and it doesn't hurt that there are new blooms beginning to peek out of their buds like these pink rhododendrons.
The winter camillias are still beautiful, and this one was in perfect form.
These gardens will be prettier in a month of two, but this tree carving (just like Mark) looks good any time of the year.
Another day we took a walk through the Birmingham Gardens, complete with tropical plants inside their greenhouses. Mark is a fan of bananas, and these were almost ready to pick.
Spring is beginning to show its colors, and Denisa loves the delicate new flowers of spring.
We're always looking for beautiful places to get exercise, so public parks will always be favorite stops for us.
We got some great exercise at Ruffmore Mountain park in the northeast section of the city. Hiking up and down hills and valleys, we got over a thousand feet in elevation gain while we hiked over six miles.
On one of those hills we could see down into the quarry that was once part of Ruffmore Mountain.
Not exactly mountain hiking, we still made it to Sloss Peak--elevation 1,104 feet.
Denisa is always looking for wild flowers, and today we spotted one that we had never seen before. With a dappled green leaf, it had an even more curious bud.
We finally saw one blooming, and had to snap a picture. Later we would find out that from seed to bloom can be ten years for a trillium plant. So this tiny plant is actually an old-timer.
Another stop in Birmingham was going to our first ever greyhound race track. We chose the Wednesday afternoon matinee race, and we were the only ones sitting in the stands outside.
Just like a horse race, the dogs are paraded out front for all the people in the stands to inspect. The handlers yelled out to Denisa, "Hi Mom!" so I think having someone take pictures was unusual. The races are broadcast inside the race track building. So this pre-race parade was obviously for the people inside betting on the races--not for the one white-haired lady with a camera outside.
Once all the dogs were placed inside the starting gates, the handlers had to jog to the finish line in order to catch the dogs at the end of the race. Most races were a lap and a half long, so the dogs would be running further than the handlers. The race began when the mechanical rabbit ran in front of the starting gate, the gates were opened, and the dogs gave chase. This "rabbit" actually looked like a high speed toy race car with a white towel attached to a stick beside it. Whatever it looked like to a greyhound, it was good motivation to run their fastest around that track.
The dogs seemed to enjoy the race, and they were escorted back to their pens right after their race. Another eight dogs were led out for the next race, and we began again. We stayed for half of the dozen races in the matinee session, hearing that the evenings were better attended.
Another stop we made was downtown Birmingham. We parked at Kelly Ingram Park, the staging place for the famous civil rights protests in 1953. There was much unrest in this area in the 1950's, including the bombing of an African American Baptist church that killed four young girls. They are immortalized in this statue in the park, right across from the 16th Street Baptist Church. There are historical walks and other things to see downtown. But after being approached by two different homeless people who instructed us on how much money we should give them, Denisa was ready to move on.
So we headed to the last thing on our long list of Birmingham sites. We made the trip to Vulcan Park, fittingly named after the Roman God of fire and forge. Since we had already visited the steel furnaces of Birmingham, we understood how that name originated. Vulcan is the largest cast iron statue in the world, and he is looking over southern Birmingham from his perch high above the city.
We can see the scale of Vulcan and his tower better with the people standing on the left side of the base. Built for the 1904 World's Fair, it was quite an engineering feat to place his 56-foot-tall body on top of that 123 foot tower.
Today we say good-bye to Birmingham from our perch in Vulcan Park.
We have enjoyed our time in the Birmingham area, but we have some surprising plans coming up!
