We wrapped up Alabama. In six days we saw a decent chunk of northern and central Alabama: Huntsville, Scottsboro, Decatur, Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuskegee, Tuscaloosa, and a few small towns and rural attractions inbetween.
When we told people in the DC area that we were going to Alabama, many of them asked us "why" - and when we were in Alabama and told people we are from DC, many of them also asked us "why." But there's a lot to see and do in Alabama, the people live up to positive southern stereotypes about friendliness, and people didn't really live up to the negative southern stereotypes, at least not in the big cities and interstate corridors were mostly stuck to.
Alabama has a ton of civil rights museums, all the major cities seem to have at least two. We mostly stuck to places where events actually happened rather than museums: we toured the 16th Street Baptist Church that got bombed by the KKK, we walked through the public park where Bull Connor used dogs and hoses on protestors, we visited the bus stop where Rosa Parks got on board her bus. If you can get to Tuskegee, the airfield where the Tuskegee Airmen trained is still preserved as both a museum and a working civil aviation airport and was super cool.
There's Confederate stuff but nowhere near as much as you'd expect. Overall, I spent a similar amount of time in Indiana a few years ago and saw way more Confederate flags in Indiana than in Alabama, as little sense as that makes historically and geographically. The most, ahem, "unreconstructed" place I visited was the First Confederate White House in Montgomery (which Jeff Davis lived in for 2 months before the Confederate government left for the more prestigious state of Virginia) and it was much better than the Confederate White House in Richmond in terms of artifacts and restoration. Northern Alabama (Huntsville and thereabouts) and Tuscaloosa both voted against secession and the locals are very eager to tell you that. There's actually a town in northern Alabama named Grant and it was founded during the Civil War by Alabamans who admired U.S. Grant.
Birmingham is no longer the biggest city in Alabama, but it feels the biggest. It feels like an urban area. It once produced 25% of all US iron, then completely lost that industry, and has rebounded nicely due to having a STEM-focused university in UAB. Huntsville is now the largest city but it feels, idk, like what Fauquier County will be in 20 years: mountains and defense contractors. It feels like a big suburb rather than a city. Montgomery feels the most southern of anywhere we went and was also by far the most overtly religious place.
Tuscaloosa reminds me of Norman, OK: both places have nowhere near enough tree cover for how hot they get. UA and OU are similar architecturally. I was surprised at how little the Alabamans I met talked about college sports: they're not nearly as obsessed with this as I expected them to be. If I hadn't been checking the news on my phone, I wouldn't have any clue that Alabama was making a deep March Madness run or that the football team has recently had a few big recruiting wins.
Both airports I went to (Huntsville and Birmingham-Shuttlesworth) were nice, clean, modern, and with minimal lines.
