To The Stars and Beyond

Enough of Mississippi – time to leave the lovely Tishomingo Park and go to the big city – Huntsville, Alabama. I was married at one time to a Marine and we were stationed in Huntsville for almost a year, way back when. It has certainly changed since then. I heard someplace that it is the city with the largest growth of technology jobs in the United States. The place is huge. It is located in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. If you look west, it is totally flat – if you look east, you see big, big hills.

I ended up staying for four nights at Monte Sano State Park which was located ….on the top of Monte Sano mountain. You could look down from your campsite on the top of the mountain, nestled in the woods and see the Huntsville lights spread out all the way to the horizon. There were lots of trails and they even had an observatory there that never seemed to be open. I wonder what you could actually see in the observatory with all those lights down below. Huntsville is definitely Not on the Dark Sky list. 

Miko has a boyfriend (he's the one on the left, in case you don't recognize Miko)

The weather has not been all that conducive to flip flops and Pina Coladas.  

The clouds are low on the mountain today

What is that white stuff?  Alabama, you disappoint me so.

My first stop in Huntsville was to the visitor center where I spent maybe a half hour with a very personable Visitor Center lady named Mildred. She told me about an artist's enclave where there were over 200 artist studios that you could visit all based in one old warehouse.

Instruments made out of cigar boxes

There were three large walls of pencil drawings of perhaps album covers?  The artist was really into Tom Waits - tons of Tom Waits pictures

One of the reasons I came to Huntsville was to drive about an hour out of the way to a place called Russell Cave. It is a National Monument. People had been living there off and on since 10,000 BC. I seem to be running into these ancient sites a lot this trip. I now know what they call all the ages that these people lived in – I have it memorized and I shall bore you with the list. Ice Age, Archaic or Paleo, Woodland and finally Mississippian.

The cave

The main reason though that I thought I would stop in Huntsville was to go to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. Huntsville was where so much history happened starting with bringing over German scientists right after World War II to build the space program. So...the day comes and I thought to myself – Do I really want to do this? It is either go to the Space Center or stay home and do laundry, read books and nap. I'm afraid to say that napping won out – no Space Center for me. Oh well.

I moved on to Austell Georgia which is just west of Atlanta. I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos about Rvs where one of the front tires blows and there is a total loss of control, sending the driver into the ditch and even sometimes rolling the rigs right over on their sides. I know, I know – I should not watch things like this but it is too late. So because of my terror at this happening, I have come to a place that makes and installs something called Safe-T-Plus. If you have a tire blowout, it is supposed to help make sure that you don't go veering off the road. By going to the factory to get it installed, I saved about $500. Of course some of that is offset by the amount of gas I used to get to the Atlanta area.

Where I spent the night, behind the factory

It's that white tube there - going to protect me from being a YouTube star. 

And yes, I did drive up on those ramps all by myself.