Sweet Home Alabama
“In Alabama, you come out of the hospital, they have to stamp your birth certificate with either Alabama or Auburn, or you don’t leave.”
It’s not our home, but it is pretty sweet.
We started our day in Birmingham, Alabama in typical Lengel fashion. With a National Weather Service dense fog advisory. After living through the Ice Fog of Missouri, we weren’t too worried. The temps were above freezing and we now were experts with the fog lights. Both the front and the rear.
Today, I drove the first leg of the journey. We needed to cover over 450 miles if we wanted to reach our home in Bluffton, South Carolina, so we got an early start.
Lisa was back at it behind the lens. She captured this shot shortly after sunrise.
Thanks to a tip from our friend Joe, we took a more leisurely route home in order to avoid Atlanta. It took us through Auburn, Alabama and we decided to take a quick tour of the campus of Auburn University.
It was my turn to grab the camera and I captured the shot of Samford Hall at the top of this post. William J Samford was the governor of Alabama from 1900-1901. Pretty impressive to get a building named after you with just one year in the governorship. But who am I to criticize, since I have a grand total of zero buildings named after me.
Back on the road, we soon found ourselves crossing the border into The Peach State of Georgia.
We saw cotton farms … and tree farms … and solar farms.
Once again, we did a poor job of planning for lunch. Luck would have it that as we started feeling hunger pains, we hit a stretch of the trip without any restaurants in sight. Or grocery stores. Or convenience stores.
Over an hour later - after numerous “debates” about who decided to keep going as we passed the last restaurant - we ran smack into the world-renowned Nu-Way Weiners.
They say it’s “the best hot dog since 1916”. Makes me wonder how good the 1915 hot dog was. Gourmet Magazine says it’s “one of America’s ten best hot dog joints”. The New York Times says they are “the acknowledged king of this particular hill”. How lucky can one couple be?
Unfortunately, when they say “drive-thru”, they mean drive through. Which wasn’t happening in our RV. We had been warned.
But no worries. There’s more than one way to skin that dog!
The young lady at the window got quite a kick out of this approach.
We did one “regular” (chili dog), one “all the way” (same plus coleslaw) and one plain with mustard.
My favorite was the “regular”. Lisa had no opinion, since she didn’t take a bite of any of them. Let’s just say she wasn’t happy with my choices.
After lunch, we hit a huge milestone. We rolled through our first 1500 miles on the new rig! And check out those temps in the mid sixties!
Now, we were cookin’.
We then added another 150 miles to end up with over 1650 miles on our maiden journey.
One last stop at the Savannah Wildlife Refuge on Alligator Alley, before we crossed our final border into beautiful South Carolina. Safe and sound.
