Our January Trip to Louisiana-Part 2

Read about Part 1 HERE.

So January 2nd saw us rising and shining in partly sunny coastal Alabama at Lorraine and Chris' house.
Chris had to work that day but Lorraine was on school break from her lunch lady job so we did a little sightseeing.

First it was off for a short walk.  We took a trail near Village Point Park to see a guy about a tree.........

It's a really BIG oak tree!  See that speck in yellow to the right of the tree?  That's Lorraine.

This tree is known as the Jackson's Oak.  It's 95 feet tall and 28 feet in circumference. It was notable even back in the 1700's as it was a survey marker in an old Spanish Land Grant map from 1787.

What I can gather, during the War of 1812, in 1814 specifically, after General Andrew Jackson and his troops drove the British out of the Pensacola area of Florida(Florida was Spanish Territory then, with coastal Louisiana, the Mississippi Territory-which also encompassed present day Alabama-and Western Florida-the Panhandle including Pensacola-were disputed territory between the US and Spain),

Jackson and his men bivouacked in this grove of oak trees before heading to New Orleans(and the Battle of New Orleans).
Gen. Jackson is said to have climbed into this oak tree so as to address and give his men a rousing speech before the march forward West to NOLA.

It's near impossible to get a goodly amount of Jackson's Oak into a camera shot it's so massive, much like the Angel Oak we visited in South Carolina last Spring.  I tried to get a shot into the canopy of the tree but without any leaves(it was Winter when I took this)it wasn't so great a picture but you do see a lot of the silvery moss draped on it's impressive branches.
I'd like to see the Jackson Oak again but in full foliage. ;-)

Anyway, after seeing the tree we trotted back to the parking lot but not before passing a woman with her dog, who asked us if we belonged to that Fiat parked back in the lot.  Yes, it was Lorraine's car(which she loves by the way!)and those two struck up a conversation.  Seems that woman needs/wants to buy a car and was pumping Lorraine for information on her particular model.  I hope that woman got some good pointers and made a good car buying decision when it was all said and done. ;-)

Next up Lorraine drove us to see another guy about a church and it's property. 
This is where Chris works.  He is the head groundskeeper of a local Catholic Church. 
And wouldn't you know it, where he works is the same name as the church and porochial school I attended in Virginia as a child.
We drove by lots of land the church owns....church, chapel, rectory, school, fields for various sports.....there was a LOT of buildings and land this church owns.  And Chris is the only groundskeeper, which seems like a lot of work for one person to me!  If you know the Monsignor there, tell him Chris deserves a raise. ;-)

After stopping at the equipment shed and saying "Hey!" to Chris as he ate his lunch, we were off again to see another Wonder of the Area.

But this wasn't a Natural Historical Wonder but a Modern one............

A Buc-ee's gas station/convenience store in Baldwin County Alabama.  Said to be the "Disneyland of Convenience Stores" it was the first Buc-ee's built outside of Texas(and opened on my birthday in 2019).
Built off the Baldwin Beach Expressway it's a must stop on the way to Pensacola FL I hear and everyone for 50 miles must have been in that store the day we were there! lolz

We did use the restrooms since they are suppose to be amazingly clean and then we browsed around.

Me in front of the "Wall of Jerky".   Or you could say just another jerk by the jerky. lolz

Leg Lamp shirts that McVal would have scarfed up had she been there.....plus they were on SALE!lolz

Southern saying pillows and mugs because we are in the South.

 And then there were funny saying t-shirts with a Southern theme.

And then funny signs about pets.

Now I didn't even take photos of....all. the. food. and. drink.
Canned/bagged/bottled as well as freshly cooked.  The smells in that place were amazing and mouth watering.
But we resisted, I only  bought the bumper sticker and chap stick in the photo 7 back. 

We hopped on over to a place called the "Mellow Mushroom" for lunch.........

Here I am with the Mellow Mushroom man.  Gotta get my funny touristy photos in, right?

I heard about this regional chain from a young blogger I use to read/follow who lived in Eastern Tennessee(she no longer blogs).  She and her hubs are vegan and this was a hipster place they liked to eat at.

And here is Lorraine outside of their "Flushrooms". lolz

And here's the pizza Hubs and I shared for lunch there.  We had ordered a pizza called "Holy Shitake" but they were out of mushrooms for it(I find that so ironic......the place is called the Mellow Mushroom and they had no mushrooms*snort*).
So we punted and got the "Funky Q. Chicken", a pie with bbq chicken, mozzarella and cheddar cheese, caramelized onions, Applewood smoked bacon and finished with a bbq sauce swirl.
While I would have preferred the Holy Shitake(as Churches and shrines seemed to be the theme of the day)the Funky Q. Chicken hit the spot.

Then it was off again to see a guy about another church..........but you'll have to wait for that piece in Part 3.

Sluggy

Our January Trip to Louisiana-Part 1

I don't know what possessed our daughter to decide to get married in early January(probably because the venue they wanted was available then).
But she did, so Hubs and I had to take a trip to Louisiana for her wedding.
Traveling here in Pennsylvania in January is a crap shoot no matter if you drive or fly due to the unpredictability of the weather.  The train is really not an option since we'd have to drive 2 hours to Harrisburg and pay for parking for 2 weeks for that.

We priced out the options and driving a rental car/gas/hotel/food/dog boarding was almost half the price of flying to LA/hotel/car rental/gas/food/dog boarding.   Plus we had things the Daughter had left here to bring to her so the car made the most sense.

So we rented a full sized car from Enterprise, dropped off the puppies at our local family run boarding place on the 30th and left at dark o'thirty on December 31st....yes, New Year's Eve Day.
We'd be ringing in the New Year somewhere in podunk Tennessee which was fine by me as we aren't NYE party people.

The first day we didn't stop unless absolutely necessary....for food, coffee for Hubs,, potty breaks and to stretch our legs.

Except for one stop in Carlisle PA at the Lindt Outlet for a small bag of chocolate. ;-)

Our first stop for food(besides the biscuits we ate in the car for breakfast from Mickey D's near home)was at Cook-Out in Harrisonburg VA.  I texted eldest son's GF a pic and told her to guess where we were(she went to college at James Madison U nearby).

And I found 2 pennies there of course! lolz

We stopped again at a gas station/convenience store(for gas, potty and Hub's coffee) further down I-81 in Dublin, VA...............

And I found another nice shiny penny right at the counter/register for my collection.

We pulled into the Quality Inn around 6 ish that evening in Bull's Gap TN.  We had stayed here on a previous trip but it had a new name now(same chain but a different level of "quality", thus a different name).

We quickly weighed our dinner options....Taco Bell across the street, McDonald's next door or the truck stop convenience store sandwiches(as there wasn't a restaurant attached to this one).  So we drove South a couple miles down the road away from the motel(we already knew there was a bar North of the motel and a Mexican restaurant we ate at in which probably wasn't there any longer).

Me at the bar in April 2014......

And a quick Google says the restaurant was gone in 2019.

So we landed at another convenience store/gas station with a Subway attached to it for dinner.
I had my usual Subway order though at that late hour I should have only gotten a half sub.  I had to sit up way too late that evening in a tired state to digest that sucker so I did actually ring in the new year at midnight.
yay me!

We wandered through the convenience store part after eating and before fueling up so we were ready to hit the road first thing in the A.M. and I found this under a rack of keychains....

So back at the motel, I sat on the sofa in the room and perused a free local newspaper we got from the lobby.  Love this front page story they had.......

Can you tell nothing much(bad/newsworthy)ever happens in this place? lolz

Oh!  There was also a Food City ad in the paper..........

I'm always interested in food stores we don't have here and to see what other folks pay for groceries.
Belinda over at "My Frugal Workshop" has mentioned she shops at this chain sometimes.

I figured we'd have a hard time getting to sleep since it was Dec. 31st and there might be a fair amount of partying folks staying at motels(especially since this exit had a truck stop and 2 motels)but this place is pretty much in the middle of nowhere TN so those fears were for naught.

While I was waiting for my dinner to digest I took a shower instead of in the morning.
This was the situation I found in the bathroom.......

The clip holding the shower head was broken.........

And when you turned on the shower head the cord jumped around like a snake from the force of the water flowing through it, soaking the walls and the floor.  It was tricky maneuvering things....you had to close the nozzle thingy if you needed two hands to soap up or do your shampoo, then bend down, pick up the shower head and open the nozzle again so the "water snake" was controled.
Fun times people, fun times....
We reported what needed to be repaired when we checked out so management could address the problem.

But things took a bizarre turn the next morning at the complimentary breakfast and how!

We went down to the lobby and the breakfast area and chose a table to eat at.
Hubs went over to the coffee/tea station in the background of this photo below to make his first cup of coffee for the day....

I proceeded into the breakfast alcove where the food was laid out in the very back of this photo............

Sorry it's fuzzy but I had to blow up a stock photo from the motel's website as I didn't DARE take any photos as you will understand why in a moment.

You can see the food stations and we sat to eat at the table closet to the food alcove.
The only other person in the lobby/breakfast area was the motel clerk at the front desk.
It was nice and peaceful....until.

As I finished making a plate of food and made my way to the table, Hubs came over with his coffee and said there's a full cup of coffee over on the drink station with about 12 stirrers in it and nobody around.  Strange.

As I began eating I noticed a woman shuffling in to the breakfast area toward the food alcove.  She looked a hot mess(who doesn't at 8 am?)....hair all stringy and she was wearing fuzzy pj pants and a t-shirt.  She had a strange gait to her walk like she suffered from CP or had some kind of spine injury.

Then she started staggering and swaying like a drunk(still drinking since last night maybe?) and loudly talking to someone who wasn't there like a crack head or someone off their meds so of course at this point I stopped eating and just watched her. lolz

She went from the display case of breads/muffins to the hot food chafing dishes to the juice machine to the tabletop fridge with eggs/cream cheese/yogurts in it to the bowl of fruit, asking her imaginary  friend what they thought and what they should chose to eat.
During this touching everything episode she spontaneously would stop, raise her arms and begin dancing and singing around the alcove for a few seconds before going back to asking her "friend" what they thought was a good idea to eat for breakfast.

Then she spied the waffle maker!
She began to pick up/handle all the equipment for making waffles....the big plastic fork/spork in the utensil holder for getting your hot waffle out of the machine, the can of generic Pam spray, the waffle maker itself and the little machine that dispenses waffle batter.
It's like she was from another planet and had never seen anything like all this.  Then I watched in disbelief as she took the big fork/sprok out of the utensil holder, moved the holder under the waffle batter dispenser and began dispensing batter into it.
Wtf?!lolz

Obviously the motel clerk had also been watching her somewhat bizarre behavior because he rushed over to stop the waffle batter flow before it overfilled the holder.
He tried to assist crazy crack head lady, by getting a small cup which you actually put your batter in to  pour it into the waffle maker and showing her what to do.
Crack head obviously had the attention span of a gnat because 3 seconds into his showing/explaining she danced/staggered off, praising Jesus at the top of her lungs out of the lobby.
The clerk was heard to say, "I guess I'm making a waffle now."

I think my mouth was hanging open as the clerk's eyes met mine.  He shook his head, picking up the half waffle batter filled utensil holder to remove and clean it and as he passed me said, "And it's not even 9 am.....sigh".

Now Hubs and I aren't rocket scientists but we feel that A-this clerk sees this sort of thing on a regular basis in his job there and B-that abandoned coffee with 12 stirrers in it was definitely the work of Crazy Crack Head lady.

In our trips in and out of the motel when leaving that morning we never saw CCH lady again and we suspected that she wandered in from either the Motel 8 next door to our motel or the truck stop next door to the Motel 8 and decided to help herself to some waffle batter and coffee stirrers before the motel clerk thwarted her plan.

That was just one of the more bizarre people/motel experiences we've had in a long time.

We finally got on the road and out of there by 9 am.
We planned to stop in I think it was downtown Chattanooga  TN for lunch at a local joint but that plan was thwarted when we got there it was closed(New Year's Day holiday)plus there was little parking to be had, had they been open.  So we drove another hour and stopped in Fort Payne Alabama for gas and a latish lunch.

I opened the car door to use the bathroom inside and lookie what was waiting to be found at the gas pump?

A worse for the wear penny.

Then we hit a place called "Western Sizzlin'" for lunch.
Sort of a combination of a "meat and 3" sit down restaurant ubiquitous in the lower South and what Western Sizzlin's were back in the old days-order of cheap cut of steak(or chicken), a potato, a piece of Texas toast or rolls and an all-eat-cared-to-eat salad bar.  You could order the steak still but they had a massive full food buffet instead of just a salad bar.

And they had a lunch Senior special of $8 for the buffet so that is what we got..........

I highly recommend their teriyaki chicken, as well as the green beans, mustard greens, and the grilled squash and onions.  Besides all the fattening heavy carb foods some of the food was questionable(like a basket of deep fried potato skins just sitting out at room temp for who knows how long over on the salad bar).
We ate pretty well/healthy(avoiding carbs other than I had 1 roll and part of a pork chop)which I didn't finish as you can see.

A father and son(an older teen)sat down across from us while we were eating.  The father who looked like he had not seen his feet in many years(not that I am judging him!)came back with a heaping plate of mac and cheese with 5 rolls on top of that.  He went back for deep fried meats(chicken and pork)for another heaping plate with another 4 rolls in top of that plate before we were finished, paid and left.  There were also 3 cups of Mountain Dew(the color of which is undeniable)brought and emptied by this guy while we were there.
The teen ate about the same in similar quantities but he was rail thin.....at least for now. ;-)

We got back on the road after paying our under $18 bill!!! and made tracks for lower Alabama.
We were going to be staying with friends Lorraine and Chris for two sleeps as Lorraine was on Christmas vacation under the following Monday.

Lorraine had cooked a lovely dinner of Lasagna and Salad with Rolls.  We ate, the guys had some beers too and we chatted until well past Lorraine's bedtime of 8 pm. lolz
Hubs and I snuggled into Lorraine's office/guest room and fell dead asleep quickly wondering what fun was in store for us that next day.
Hopefully no Crack Head Ladies.......

Sluggy