{"id":1735,"date":"2015-09-14T09:58:45","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T14:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hijenx.us\/?p=1735"},"modified":"2015-09-14T09:58:45","modified_gmt":"2015-09-14T14:58:45","slug":"day-79-montgomery-birmingham-alabama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hijenx.us\/?p=1735","title":{"rendered":"Day 79: Montgomery & Birmingham, Alabama"},"content":{"rendered":"

We woke up after quite a rough night in\u00a0Montgomery<\/a>. We got called in the middle of the night, I assume from someone else in the hotel, as that is really the only way to call someone in a hotel and the front desk said they didn’t know anything about it. We will take the lesson from that to always disconnect the phone in hotels. The receptionist even said if they had needed to call us, they would have used the mobile number provided, so top tip – phones in hotels are archaic. Just unplug them. After the incident with the alarm clock in Naples, Florida, we will just be unplugging anything we have no plans to use I think.<\/p>\n

We ventured into the city and checked out the state capitol:<\/p>\n

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Very near that was the\u00a0First White House of the Confederacy<\/a>
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It was not as fully white as one might expect something referred to as such.\u00a0Jefferson Davis<\/a>, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War lived there with his family.<\/p>\n

As tired as we were, after doing that, I realized I’d forgotten the mini fridge and all the food in the motel. We headed back and fortunately were able to pick it all back up and go. Unfortunately though, at that time, Chris saw liquid coming out of the bottom of the car\u00a0so\u00a0we headed to a Dodge dealership:<\/p>\n

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We ended up spending a good hour there and even though we had initially got up reasonably early, we left at the sort of time we would have had it been a slower morning.<\/p>\n

We pressed on back north to\u00a0Birmingham<\/a>. On the way, we saw a giant Confederate flag:<\/p>\n

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We also saw this in a small town we passed through:<\/p>\n

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That said, the confederate flags were infrequent. You may be more likely to see them down here than anywhere else in the world, but the most popular flag, by far, is still the American flag itself. We saw probably 6 of these and 1000s of American flags.<\/p>\n

Birmingham was better than expected. It is high on a lot of lists about violent crime, but it looks like they have made a big push to gentrify it. It looked better and more modern than most of Montgomery honestly. It used to have a big steal industry, so they have a large state of Vulcan above the city:
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Next we popped into the small town of Warrior because it’s name was cool in an attempt to talk to people. We have had a lot of trouble getting anyone interested in speaking to us here. I think they may be more reserved here than they were in the Midwest. We tried to chat to a woman in a shop for a bit and she did talk to us (and have a lovely cat), but we didn’t learn much:
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We ended our long sleep deprived day in Huntsville, Alabama, which is the home of places like a Boeing research center:<\/p>\n

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We went for a swim and realized that Florida had quite spoiled us. The water was much colder as it was in the 80s instead of the 90s. The moon looked nice, though:<\/p>\n

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Here is the video:<\/p>\n