Oh, Alabama

Well, greetings from Foley, Ala., hometown of one of my least-favorite people of all time.

The start of this report comes to you from the Friday-afternoon packed parking lot of Foley's giant TangerOutlets mall. The 2-year-old fell asleep almost the second we departed our vacation rental in Orange Beach, and so I'm sitting guard in the van while the wife shops for Gymboree deals. I raided the Coleman ice chest behind the driver's seat for lunch: a cold bacon sandwich, some multi-grain Pringles, a Tab and one of the two leftover pieces of apple pie from our week with the wife's fam. Sitting here eating pie in the parking lot reminds me of a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover of which we had a jigsaw puzzle that I loved when I was a kid.



I think I would love to be a milkman. Bank teller or a milkman.

***

On to TJ Maxx! Negotiated a back-in parking spot this time.

Heath Post management dispatched me to the South to report on why it is that so many folks want to spend their summer vacations from hot, sticky Kentucky in the hotter, stickier Gulf Shores area. That's a good question, I thought, when given the assignment, and I still think it's a good one after a week of on-the-scene, investigative reporting. I don't have an answer.

A vehicle parked outside of the condominium just three or four doors down from us had a Daviess County plate. I never met the folks to talk to them about why they might've chosen to come here. I did talk to my father-in-law a good bit about it. He doesn't like to travel much of anywhere, but he's pretty much always up for a trip down here to the Gulf Shores area. His favorite restaurant in the world, DeSoto's Seafood Kitchen, is here, and he likes to walk the dog on the beach in the morning, before it gets too hot. His first trip down here was in the 1950s with his parents to visit his brother, who was serving at the Air Force base in nearby Panama City, Fla. My father-in-law and a bunch of his Murray State College dorm buddies in the early 1960s made a spring-break trip down here. And he's made a slew of visits since getting married and having a couple of daughters. He likes Disneyworld, and he's had good trips to the North Carolina mountains, the Southwest and the northern California coast. And he loved seeing the horses run at Chincoteague Island when he was a boy. But, by and large, if my father-in-law (a Madisonvillian for all of his almost 70 years) is thinking vacation, he's heading to Gulf Shores.

We split the drive down from Madisonville last weekend over two days. The 2-year-old is a pretty darned good traveler up until about the six-hour mark in the backseat, so we try to never push more than five hours in any given day. Besides, I love hotels.

We got a Holiday Inn Express in Pelham, just south of Birmingham. While I'm no terrific fan of the beach, I pretty much always love my trips to Alabama. Most notably, back in 2005, my wife and I executed a near-perfect exploration of Alabama's Black Belt Region: Tuskegee, Selma, Heiberger, Montgomery--all fascinating.



Plus, I've got a towboat-captain brother who lives in Florence, in the northwestern corner of the state. He's an Evansville, Ind., native, but you wouldn't know it from his accent after living in Alabama for the last 25 years or so. He loves it here, and, because of that, I love visiting him here.

And at some point before 2003, when I sent the following email to a niece-in-law, I had an interesting night south of Birmingham:

"there's a gas station/grocery/pool hall/restaurant off an i-65 exit called 'Eddie's Diner.' i stopped in there one night to get coffee and a fillup. it was about 10 p.m. anyway, there was the craziest amalgamation of stuff going on. there was this woman sitting at a pay phone, crying and talking to someone. she'd clearly just been beaten ...; it was really sad and awful. then there was a trucker dude flirting with a waitress with a coffee pot; they were both about 50, and that was sort of heart-warming because it looked like they were really being sweet to each other. and then there were these three young dudes playing pool--two white and one black. and i got to thinking, man, i don't think you could have found blacks and whites playing pool together in a highway truck stop in alabama as recently as 30 years before. so that was good, too.

"anyway, when i launch my career as a singer-songwriter in about six years, one of the songs is going to start out ..:

"there's some good stories
"and some bad stories
"in eddie's diner tonight
"and it doesn't take a
"rocket science
"to sort the dark from the light.

"except i've got to figure out something better for that last line of the opening verse because i wouldn't want someone to think dark/light refers to african american/caucasian (and not yucky/sweet), which would be an easy mistake given that i'm going to talk about race a little later on. so, as you can see, i still have a lot of work to do between now and my first open-mike-night appearance, on aug. 2, 2008."

***

OK, now we're back in Pelham, in the layover of our two-day return trip to Madisonville. The 2-year-old was starting to lose it this evening when we announced we were delaying our check-in at the Holiday Inn Express to instead first go eat and do a little shopping. We lucked out in that the Whole Foods Market here has a little children's nook (where the coffee bars often are deployed) with a terrific toy kitchen. So far, the little girl has baked a fake onion, assembled a fake pickle sandwich and boiled a fake potato. This gave my wife and I time to split $20 worth of chicken-fried tofu, brown-rice boxties and Napa-cabbage salad. It was excellent.

Despite my positive experiences in Alabama, if Kentucky was filled with Erics, you would never see one of our blue-and-white license plates further south on I-65 than the Holiday Inn Express and Whole Foods Market in Pelham--at least not any time between about March and November. It's just too darned hot, too darned bright and too darned crowded.

But Kentucky is not filled with Erics, and so, on our Monday drive down to Orange Beach, I counted eight Kentucky plates among the 76 vehicles that either passed me or I passed on the southbound 188 miles of I-65 between Pelham and our departure from the interstate at Flomaton. (I passed no Alabama vehicles, by the way, though about 10,000 of them passed me; the locals appeared to have zero regard for the posted speed limits.) Here were the state-by-state rankings:

Florida 15
Louisiana 9
Kentucky 8
Tennessee 8
Georgia 7
Mississippi 5
Texas 5
Illinois 3
Ohio 3
Virginia 3
North Carolina 2
Alaska 1
Colorado 1
Indiana 1
Maine 1
Nebraska 1
Nevada 1
Oklahoma 1
South Carolina 1

The Kentucky plates included two representatives each of Boone, Jefferson and Hopkins (yeah!) counties.

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Saturday 7 a.m. at the I-65 Exit 246 Holiday Inn Express in Pelham, and the lobby breakfast scrum is on. Thirty folks--mostly bed-heads in flip-flops--divvy half-pints of milk, toaster French toast, powdered eggs, peel-tubs of maplish syrup and Signature Cinnamon Rolls in a lamp-lighted/Fox News-screaming dining area. The wife and daughter are still snoozing in Room 304. I'm downstairs for my first breakfast round and 20 sluggish minutes on the stationary bike ("rise and grind," as so many Miami Dolphins Tweet).

Anyway, the chase of this little report is that, while I don't really get the appeal of Kentuckians' Gulf dash, I can loosely confirm it and do normally enjoy participating in it.

Among the more interesting discoveries and experiences of this trip:

-- a tornado-relief fundraiser at the Jet-Pep service station in Arab (live remote by 92.7 FM, emceed by "Joyce the Voice," $3.45-a-gallon regular unleaded and free hot dogs and Cokes);

-- the high-school football fields of the Gulf Shores Dolphins, Gardendale Rockets and Fultondale Wildcats;

-- billboards for a Kool and the Gang show Sept. 17 at Wind Creek Casino & Hotel in Atmore;

-- designation of part of I-65 as the "Ray Scott Highway;"

-- a woman in Orange Beach who had moved from Green Bay, Wisc., to deal with her own cancer and then helped nurse her husband through his (she said Packer games got so cold that a beer can would literally freeze to her husband's hand);

-- a "swap-shop" program on 1310 AM in Baldwin in which a Magnolia Springs man was offering usage of his tupelo trees by the river to beekeepers in exchange for "a jar of honey every now and then;"

-- a banner for something called the Council of Conservative Citizens near Robertsdale, and

-- Durbin Farms Fruit Basket of Clanton, a terrific market and restaurant just off I-65, which opened on May 25, 1961 (the same day the interstate opened there), which has survived tornado destruction and which today competes head-on for lunch business with a Burger King across the street by selling fresh sandwiches and home-made ice cream.





Also, I enjoyed catching up on reading the previous week's Madisonville Messenger, from which I learned that Earlington High School's "Should Have Been Class of 1976" was planning a reunion at the Elks Lodge on Saturday night; that Saint Charles not only is in danger of losing its post office but that the local United Methodist Church was closing its doors, and that Madisonville-North Hopkins has a veteran-laden football team for its first season after shifting down from Class 5A to 4A.

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The trip closed unexpectedly. On Saturday morning, north of Birmingham on I-65, as we were finishing a detailed conversation about Friends and the actors who played the six main characters, my wife remembered that she had heard that the big unclaimed-airline-baggage place existed somewhere in Alabama. She checked the map just in time for us to detour past the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman and zip northeast toward Scottsboro.

Unclaimed Baggage Center did, in fact, turn out to be a lot of fun. The concession stand sells (ah, Paducah) Dippin' Dots! My purchases included a Russian toymaker's kit for making a cardboard version of Transfiguration Church on Kizhi Island, a souvenir cap from Washington with a seal of the presidency and the 1969 Better Homes and Gardens Guide to Entertaining.



The peak-in-to-the-living-room picture on the cover made me ache to be back in our own living room, and, indeed, after Scottsboro, we pretty much kept pedal to metal and barreled back home in haste. As my mom always says, "It's always good to go, and it's always good to get back home." Hear, hear.