Leaving Tuscaloosa, we drove north to Huntsville hoping the weather would improve. For all our talk of chasing 70 degree weather, we’ve been lucky to hit 60 most days. And nights have been downright frigid.
Huntsville is apparently now the second largest city in Alabama, so we finally had a chance to stock up at Costco and Trader Joe’s.
The following morning we took a drive out to Scottsboro, Alabama to visit one of the more curious shops in the country: The Unclaimed Baggage Store. The store has been buying lost luggage after all attempts to return the items to their rightful owners were exhausted. Close to 99% of lost airline luggage is returned to its owner eventually. Some of the remaining 1% ends up here.
The store resembles a large Goodwill or thrift store, perhaps with higher end items. I spent about an hour looking through the men’s clothing section, but didn’t find anything I really wanted. The clothes are all used and seemed to be priced at about 30% of their original cost. The men’s section had many items with corporate logos, reflecting the large percentage of people who travel for business. There were a variety of interesting finds: cricket bats, musical instruments, a pair of hockey goalie pads, and tons of electronics. There was a bin of probably a hundred Amazon Fire tablets, tons of charge cords, laptops and cell phones.
Mrs. 123 had better luck than I did, finding two pairs of Lululemon shorts. There’s also an interesting museum where they keep some of the more outrageous finds such as shrunken heads, exotic musical instruments and an animatronic puppet from the movie The Labyrinth.
Browsing the store, you couldn’t help feel a twinge of regret and empathy for the people who lost all these items.
From the store, we drove about a half hour to the trailhead for a cave known as Neversink. The 162-foot open pit is owned by the Southeastern Cave Conservancy, which requires visitors to obtain a free permit. Neversink is claimed to be the most photographed pit in the region due to the beautiful fern covered ledges and the waterfalls cascading into the pit.
The trail up to the pit is about a half mile steady climb on a well-marked trail. The opening to the pit is about 40 feet across. To enter the pit, you need rappelling gear and experience. I had the latter, but not the former, so we just applied for a permit to hike to the rim.
We carefully approached the rim, sticking to solid ground and trees to hold onto so we could lean over far enough to see the bottom and snap some photos. The pictures really don’t do the pit justice. You can’t really see the bottom unless you’re there in person.
The following day I went to visit the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. Mrs. 123 wasn’t as interested, so she got to sleep in and read. The center is where the U.S. space program was born and where the rockets that first took American astronauts into space and to the moon were designed.
It’s also home to Space Camp and so the day I visited, the ratio of kids to adults was probably 5 to 1. On the bright side, the center had cut the price of weekday tickets in half through February, so for $15, I could put up with a bunch of kids.
The center doesn’t compare to the Disney-like Kennedy Space Center complex in Cape Canaveral, but it does a great job of explaining the history of the space program. Some of the first American rockets were actually versions of the German’s V-2 rockets from World War II. When the war was coming to a close, the scientists who built those rockets, including Werner von Braun, surrendered to American forces in Germany and were brought to the U.S. to jump start the space program.
The displays walk you through the progression of rockets from those original V-2 copycats to the massive Saturn 5 rockets that took Neil Armstrong to the moon. The Saturn 5 which is on display inside one of the center’s buildings, is still the most powerful rocket ever built.
I walked the various exhibits before noticing there was a tour in the Saturn 5 building at noon. I killed an hour watching a couple of movies, the first about Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, followed by a 20 minutes condensed version of the Hollywood film The Martian.
No one else showed up for the tour, so I got a private tour and was able to ask as many questions as I wanted without anybody getting annoyed with me.
One of the more interesting displays involved some of the plans for going to Mars. Because it’s such a long journey, they had to rethink a lot of things compared to the moon landing. For example, they are planning to take 3-D printers to build shelters on Mars using some of the natural resources found on the planet. They’re also considering breeding bugs onboard as a sustainable source of protein.
After I got back, we planned to take a hike, but as soon we stepped out of the trailer, it started to drizzle. Our hike turned into a quick trip to throw garbage out in the dumpster. We came back and watched the movie “Elvis” to help us prepare for our trip to Memphis a week later.
Days: 47
Miles Traveled: 6567
Next stop: Nashville
