Truth be told, there’s not much going on here. It was pretty freakin’ cold and bleak when we got to Birmingham, but we braved the elements to check out the Vulcan statue. He’s the Roman god of fire and inventor of metalwork and the Birminghamians cast him in 1904 as a tribute to the iron industry. He’s the world’s largest cast iron figure, incidentally, and really very impressive. We admired, then we cruised downtown and pulled up a couple of chairs at a modish little coffee shop to warm up for the rest of the afternoon.

In Tuskegee we visited the George Washington Carver Museum on the campus of the university. While we both knew this was the guy that came up with a bunch of uses for peanuts, we didn’t realize just what a genius he was. The easiest way to think of him is as a Renaissance Martha Stewart. He constantly experimented and devised recipes and crafty art works and then shared them through little booklets he published. The big difference between him and Martha is that he refused personal gain from his ideas. That, and I don’t reckon he tried to run over a servant.