If your travel plans call for a visit to Montgomery, Alabama and a trip through time to recount the Civil Rights Trail, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma to Montgomery march, let me recommend you extend your trip for a few days.
Leaving Montgomery, you can stop two hours later at Oneonta and the Covered Bridges of Blount County. Where were Clint Eastwood and Merle Streep? Even if you are not a country music fan, you probably have heard of Alabama, the band. Twenty years together, 65 million albums sold, 15 Platinum albums, 42 number one singles and two Grammies. Two of their members live in the Gadsden area. One, Jeff Cook, owns the Warehouse, where one can have lunch and return at night for a little line dancing. No, you do not have to give up the Fox Trot! Every mid-August the World’s Longest Yard Sale takes place from Gadsden, Alabama to Covington, Kentucky; 450 miles of yard sale bargains. For more info- (888) 805-4740.
Then it is off to Fort Payne and the Alabama Museum & fan club headquarters. Fort Payne is the Sock Capitol of the World and C.J. Wholesale Socks is the world’s largest sock outlet store. Here you can sample a world’s longest and a world’s largest all in one day. Wow! Another surprise is finding a 50,000 square foot furniture store, Atkins & Sons (there are two sons) outside of Fort Payne, at the crossroads of two state highways. People travel from all over the south to look and buy. In the same area are DeSoto State Park on Lookout Mountain and the Shady Grove Dude Ranch. Still looking for Clint Eastwood.
People come from all over the US to visit the Unclaimed Luggage Center in Scottsboro. If you have ever lost your luggage on a trip and the airline has reimbursed you for your loss, it will probably end up here, the Mecca for diehard shoppers. Unclaimed Baggage is a one-of-a-kind store snuggled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Founded in 1980, it has expanded under the direction of the son of the founders, to cover a city block, and over one million items pass through the store annually. There is a concierge desk; children’s play area and a café. Prices are 50-80% off Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price. About 60% of the merchandise is clothing and there also is section for lost and unclaimed cargo.
US Space & Rocket Center
Forty miles east of Huntsville and the US Space & Rocket Center are the Cathedral Caverns, which contains the world’s largest stalagmite forest and the world’s largest frozen waterfall (here we go again). Once in Huntsville (you have traveled from southern to northern Alabama and are almost at the Tennessee border- Memphis to the west, Nashville to the north and Chattanooga to the east) stop at Earlyworks Children’s History Museum and the Alabama Constitutional Village, the South’s largest (not world’s) hands-on history complex, circa 1819.The Huntsville Museum of Art has a traveling exhibition section and recently featured the Buccellati Silver Animals. Stroll through the Huntsville Botanical gardens and Butterfly House and see hundreds of those winged beauties up close as they fly free. Try dinner at 801 Franklin, a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence restaurant.
Up Up & Away
Are you ready to tour the US Space & Rocket Center, the earth’s largest (same as world’s?) space museum housing actual spacecraft from the NASA space program, including the nation’s only full-scale shuttle mockup and the Apollo 16 capsule. There are 60 hands-on exhibits, the Spacedome IMAX Theatre and the world famed Space Camp Training Center. Check out the 363-foot Saturn V rocket designed in Huntsville to take astronauts to the Moon. The center is a National Historic Landmark. Try the Space Shot that soars 140 feet in the air with 4G’s of force during liftoff. Experience three times the tug of gravity as you spun inside the centrifuge. Take a journey to the Red Planet inside the Mars Mission simulator, or climb on a cliff-face of a Martian volcano. Kids were arriving and leaving at the US Space Camp that provides intensive astronaut training for youngsters, teachers and other adults. This is one of the “Big Three” for “space junkies”; the Kennedy Space Center, Huntsville and Houston’s Johnson’s Space Center. Once you have completed visiting all three, you are really” out of this world”.
Real Travel Adventures 