Spring Recess 2007

There were no classes on Friday, April 6 (for "Spring Recess"...not to be confused with "Spring Break" which lasted a whole week in March). So we decided to go on a road trip to see Alabama and Mississippi. These were two of the last three of the 50 states that I had never been to (the last one I've never been to is Florida...we were going to go in May if my mom hadn't gotten runovered by an SUV). On Thursday afternoon (after Gina's classes), we headed off towards Birmingham (via Chattanooga). I thought Birmingham might be a nice place to stay but in fact it wasn't. We had enormous difficulty finding anything pretty there. Five Points South was not too bad however:



After some pretty cheap Latin American food nearby, we kept going and spent the night in what turned out to be a really dirty & nasty motel half way to Tuscaloosa (besides holes in the ceiling, there was also, for example, a used condom in the bathroom...for your information, it was the Scottish Inn Bessemer on I-59 between Birmingham & Tuscaloosa).

Tuscaloosa (which we visited the next morning) was a nice town. As we were driving into town, Gina had her first taste of hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which she liked quite a bit (she usually does not especially like sweet things). After taking a walking tour of downtown Tuscaloosa (during which I nearly froze my hands off...a late freeze was striking the south that weekend), we looked around the campus of the University of Alabama (which is MUCH nicer than the campus of the University of Tennessee...much, much, much nicer). Here is a picture of a large lawn with Oliver-Barnard Hall (1889):



We continued down I-59 towards New Orleans, stopping at Hattiesburg for lunch (Cici Pizza). I had had a job interview for the University of Southern Mississippi at the AHA. The interview didn't lead to anything but having now been to Hattiesburg, I must say, thank god I didn't end up there! A very unattractive and uninteresting town. We did encounter some pretty purple flowers on the side of the I-59, somewhere in Mississippi:



Entering New Orleans was kind of creepy, since there were entire neighborhoods that were completely abandoned. It was Good Friday and the "Passion Live" was being held in the middle of one of these abandoned neighborhoods:



We were only in New Orleans for four hours or so. We walked along the Mississippi, stopped at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar for a not-very-good beer (for me) and a not-very-good vodka sour (for Gina)...



...and went to Preservation Hall for a couple of sets. We were thinking about getting dinner prior to leaving town, but couldn't find anything that we really wanted, so ended up heading west out of town, stopping at a Denny's for dinner. Gina found a coupon for a pretty cheap (and clean) hotel by the airport.

The next morning, we headed back towards Mississippi, on I-10 and I-55. To the south and west of Lake Pontchartrain, the freeway was basically a causeway above the bayous. Our next stop was Natchez, MS. It was the time of the "Spring Pilgrimage"; we could have gone on special historic house tours, but didn't really have the time or the money. Instead, we went on our own walking tour, seeing some of the old houses, such as Rosalie (1820):



By noontime, I needed a fix and got a coffee at the very good Natchez Coffee Co. on Franklin St. We had lunch at the Pig Out Inn Barbeque. It was ok (and mainly cheap).

Out of Natchez, we drove along the Natchez Trace Parkway (a National Park-managed road following the ancient trail connecting Central Tennessee to the Mississippi River). Here is a short segment of the original trail (which had sunk down below the forest floor after centuries of use):



We followed the Natchez Trace past Jackson, to the site of a cypress swamp:



By then it was late afternoon on Saturday, and we decided to drive back to Knoxville that night. We stopped at the China Kitchen in Newton before driving pretty much non-stop back to Knoxville, stopping only briefly at Birmingham so I could get my fix (at a Starbucks we had noticed near Five Points South).