Birmingham day 2

This morning featured a serious rain storm. It was a good morning to do laundry and catch up with some trip planning.

To do laundry at my hotel, however, I had to find three dollars in quarters. When was the last time you had to collect quarters? The tech revolution has yet to hit low-end public appliances. The hotel had no quarters, the hotel next door had no quarters, the coffee shop around the corner, ironically, runs a no-cash business. So I ended up walking a half a mile to a Publix supermarket to find quarters. Fortunately there was a break in the really heavy rain. I thought it was polite to purchase a small item rather than just ask for change. I took my item to the check stand, gave the young man a 20 and explained I wanted five dollars worth of quarters with my change. He handed me my item, which cost 2 and change, along with my receipt. And then he handed me a 10, a 5 and 5 dollars in quarters. Ummmmmm.... I explained that he neglected to take out the price of the item. It took about 5 minutes to convince him that I really did need to pay for for it. I finally handed him back the 5, and calculated the change that he he owed me. I think he finally got it.

The other thing I figured out this morning is that Birmingham has one set of streets and two sets of avenues. The railroad being all-important, the avenues are distinguished by being North or South of the tracks. For example, 1st Ave. N is on one side and 1st Ave. S. And they fan out from there. I’m not aware of another city that has two sets of avenues distinguished in that way.

Although the skies remained cloudy, the rain let up in the afternoon and I was able to take a short outing to Moss Rock Preserve [http://www.hooveral.org/214/Moss-Rock-Preserve]. This is a beautiful little gem of an area, only about 20 minutes out of downtown Birmingham. Although not listed in any of the usual travel advisories, it is clearly popular with the locals as many families were out appreciating the break in the rain. A main feature of this preserve are the waterfalls. Although I never made it up to the upper falls (they trail system was not well marked), I still got some nice images of the lower falls.

Tomorrow I drive down to Mobile, my first look at a coast since I left California.