News for January 24th 2010
They meet at Barber Motorsports Park and Ride
Several Birmingham area car clubs gathered today to drive their classic and custom cars along back roads as part of their annual Polar Bear Run.
About 75 car enthusiasts met at the Barber Motorsports Park to begin the ride, which included stops at covered bridges in Blount County, Our Lady of the Angels Monastery and lunch at the All Steak Restaurant in Cullman.
Edited: January 24th, 2010
Sweet Home Alabama is a Prime Family Vacation Destination
A family vacation is more than just a vacation; it helps tighten the bonding among the family members. Everybody should go for a family vacation at least once in a year. Vacations refresh your mind and soul; it breaks the monotony of mechanical urban lifestyle.
Why don’t you head to Alabama this year? Alabama is a state full with family fun, amusement and entertainment packages. From ocean to the mountain peaks, Alabama has a small slice of everything. It is said that the state never disappoints anybody.
The state offers varieties of activities for travelers of all ages and likings. Many people fail to realize the wide range of attractions Alabama offers. To know Alabama and its culture, you have to come here. Rest assured, the state will not let you down.
Eastern Alabama is home to the mountains. If camping and hiking are some your hobbies you should look for Alabama vacation rentals in and around Eastern Alabama. Spectacular views and mesmerizing landscape are the main attractions here. Hiking, camping are the main activities. Whether you come here during fall, winter or spring – Alabama will offer you an unforgettable vacation time.
Southern Alabama is home to some popular beaches. The southern part of the state touches the gulf coast. Beach activities and fun are the main attractions here. Build sand castles, enjoy the waves and participate in beach sports. You will find many miniature golf courses near the beach; plenty of restaurants and shops will make your beach escape more attractive and enjoyable.
Alabama is home to many vibrant and colorful cities; many cultural events and festivals are held here through out the year. You can consult the event or festival calendar of the state and visit the cities during a specific cultural event or festival.
Little known fact….Alabama has more navigatible rivers than any State in the nation. There are forty-seven rivers in Alabama. From the Alabama River to the Coosa River where Treasure Island Bed and Breakfast is on the main channel.
Birmingham hosts an array of cultural programs every year; these events will make your family vacation more exciting. Historical museums are worth visiting; a trip to museums is always exciting for kids and adults. The famous Butterfly Exhibit is something your children would definitely enjoy; it is a huge collection of butterflies; it is an out-of-the-world experience to walk among hundreds of butterflies.
Simply put, there are so many things to do in Alabama that it is difficult to cover them all in one trip! You will always want to come back here again and again. However, a thoughtful plan can help you make best use of your time and money.
Edited: January 24th, 2010
Brett Favre’s Mississippi hometown has awkward allegiance for NFC championship
It’s not really what you’d call a turf war. Folks around here are too friendly, too wrapped up in each other’s lives, for that.
There’s no debating the awkwardness of it all, though, when Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre, the pride of Kiln, matches up against the Saints, the heart and soul of this country crossroads an hour’s drive east of New Orleans.
Over at Da Burger Barn there’s a banner inviting customers to gather for tonight’s NFC Championship Game, and calling it a big-screen TV “Saints Party.”
Just 50 yards away, however, a security gate marks the entrance to a long private drive, along which stand a U.S. flag and a large purple-and-gold Vikings banner flapping in the wind.
This is the home of Bonita Favre, Brett’s mother. Her phone number is unlisted but there are 35 other Favre listings in the Kiln directory, and their temporary allegiance to that team way up north on the other end of the Mississippi is just another adjustment in a story that seems to twist as oddly and as often as the river itself.
“A friend of mine asked the other day if she could borrow a Vikings shirt to wear to work but I had to tell her no,” Bonita said. “I’ve only got two myself. We’re afraid to buy too many because we don’t ever know where Brett is going to end up.”
Down at Dolly’s Quick Stop, the convenience store and gas station situated at Kiln’s lone four-way traffic signal, there is further evidence of how keeping up with the local football legend can be exhilarating and exhausting at once.
On Friday, in a rush job that started with pressure washing and a fresh coat of primer paint earlier in the week, an artist from New Orleans put the finishing touches on a new mural for the exterior wall at Dolly’s. For 13 years there was a painting of a Green Bay Packers helmet there, along with thousands of signatures and adoring messages scrawled by visitors from Wisconsin.
At 3 p.m. Friday a new image debuted, with colorful depictions of all the helmets that Favre has worn from the Hancock High School Hawks to the University of Southern Mississippi to four more teams in the NFL, the Atlanta Falcons, the Packers, the New York Jets and, perhaps but only perhaps the last, the Vikings.
By 5 p.m. the mural was splattered with supportive signatures and messages all over again, including one impertinent “Saints Rule!” Leaned against the wall on the ground were four pieces of bronze artwork shaped like the Saints fleur-de-lis logo and marked by tributes to No. 9, New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees.
Could have been any of the kidders passing by Dolly’s and yelling “Who Dat?” out their truck windows who placed the contradictory Saints icons there. All are welcome, all are tolerated in Brett’s back yard.
There’s a car with a Utah license plate mixed in with the locals at Dolly’s, and two more with Wisconsin and Illinois tags down at the Broke Spoke, a funky biker bar that serves as the highlight of every Favre pilgrimage.
Steve Haas, the joint’s owner, wore a shirt of Vikings purple under his overalls for a live ESPN interview Friday morning. There’s a short little rattail braid poking down from the back of his baseball cap and a big smile on his face in anticipation of tonight’s bonanza.
Haas figures 500 people, about a quarter of Kiln’s population, will come to the Broke Spoke to watch the NFC title game on giant outdoor screens situated around the dirt parking lot and to munch on free BBQ chicken, baked beans and potato salad. That’s half as many showed up to watch Favre’s 1997 Super Bowl victory with the Packers, a game played at the Louisiana Superdome, but then the passion of wandering Green Bay fans is tough to match.
The Broke Spoke stayed open around the clock for eight straight days during that Super Bowl rush, selling beer to Packer backers who came in such numbers that the street had to be closed off by the sheriff and traffic cops brought in.
“Them Cheeseheads,” said Haas, “they’re as crazy as Cajuns. We had people from Wisconsin reaching over, plucking blades of grass and putting them in Ziploc bags so they could have a souvenir of Brett’s hometown. They were picking up rocks and putting them in paper cups, too.”
This is the sideshow portion of the Favre tour, and Bonita doesn’t mind playing along.
She stood at the Broke Spoke on Friday with a bottle of beer in her hand, laughing and posing for pictures with anyone who asked, including people in Saints gear. Brett’s mom wore a Vikings cap over hair that recently was dyed blond, and dangly earrings featuring a pair of little, purple Minnesota jerseys with Favre’s No. 4.
“Got those at the Mall of America,” she says of the jewelry, purchased at the Minneapolis landmark famous for its outrageous size. “That was quite a trip.”
You could say that. On that same weekend, in the Metrodome, Favre stole a victory from San Francisco with a scrambling, 32-yard touchdown pass that Greg Lewis caught in the back of the end zone with two seconds remaining.
“Sometimes I surprise myself,” Favre said earlier this week, and at 40 his latest return from retirement has been shockingly sweet.
That single season with the Jets in 2008 seems barely worth a mention around here, and his other lifetime with the Packers, though worthy of automatic Hall of Fame induction, ended with a devastating Favre interception in another NFC Championship Game three years ago against the New York Giants.
There’s an old parking-lot storage shed still painted in Packers green at the Broke Spoke, but it’s been mostly covered by a beer ad featuring curvy swimsuit models.
“Hey,” Bonita mischievously calls out while pointing toward the poster, “ask Stevie (the bar’s owner) why he put my picture on that outhouse without asking.”
Oh, yeah, it’s a ton of fun being a Favre these days, and messing with the tourists, too. Some of them don’t know that Brett has lived for years in Hattiesburg 80 miles to the north. Or that his hometown is pronounced KILL, without the “n,” for reasons no one can explain or remember. Or that Favre never actually played at the new high school field that bears his name and features a bronze statue of the quarterback.
At North Hancock Elementary, once the area’s K-12 educational center, birds peck at grass seed dropped to cover bare patches on the field where Favre first made his name and where pee-wee league games alone are played these days.
Head out of town, almost to the county line, and there’s an empty lot with a skinned cement pad where once stood Favre’s On the Bayou. A sign still stands by the highway with the restaurant’s name, along with a cartoon image of an alligator sunning peacefully on a sandy beach under a carefree sky.
Hurricane Katrina ended this Favre family franchise in 2005, doing so much water damage to the building that there was little left but to bowl it over.
There is water everywhere around Kiln, trickling here, seeping there, pooling out in the thick and seemingly ordinary woods until something extraordinary, like Katrina, brings a killing tide.
Bonita lives on a peninsula of high ground first bought by her parents in 1942. The gators and snakes of the surrounding Rotten Bayou are her closest neighbors and it was a fine arrangement until Katrina pushed 6 feet of water in the old Favre home. There’s a new house for Bonita there now, built on the same foundation, and therein lies the origin of Brett’s stubborn streak.
“My parents had been through all the major storms there and we were there during Camille,” Bonita said, referring to the Category-5 hurricane that wiped the Mississippi gulf coast clean in 1969. “I was pregnant with Brett that time. I figured if I made it through Camille, like so many other people did, but this was just a lot different.”
This is all back story, and not usually of prime interest to people passing through to get a flavor of Brett Favre. It’s the locals who know the spot on Highway 603 where Irvin Favre died in 2003, just a mile down from the brand new football-themed sign welcoming visitors to Brett Favre’s hometown.
Brett’s father and the high school football coach for three quarterbacking sons, Irvin was found slumped behind the wheel in a roadside ditch, dead of an apparent heart attack.
Brett played on, throwing for four touchdowns in a memorable Monday night win over Oakland before returning home for the funeral, and that is part of the legend, too.
On a bend of two-lane pavement near Brett’s old home is another unmarked site familiar to Kiln residents. There in 1990 Favre lost control of his car and flipped it three times. Surgeons had to remove 30 inches of his small intestine but, six weeks later, Favre was back on the football field, leading a Southern Mississippi upset of Alabama.
Billy Ray Dedeaux, the retired teacher who had Favre in his fourth-grade class, prefers other memories, like the time he gave Brett three licks with a wooden paddle as punishment for playing tackle football in the schoolyard when two-hand touch was the well-established campus rule.
“I spelled Brett’s last name wrong that whole year of school, spelled it ‘Farve,’ like it sounds,” Dedeaux said. “It was only after Brett’s little brother Jeff came along into my class and told me it was wrong that I ever knew. Brett never said anything about it.”
Dedeaux doesn’t like the traffic and the crowds down at Dolly’s Quick Stop in Kiln. He prefers his 80-acre farm out in the country, where a herd of black cattle turns and ambles over to the fence at the sound of him talking on the front porch.
“Brett still calls me Mr. Dedeaux,” he said, showing off photos of treasured trips to Lambeau Field with the Favre family. “I told him he can call me Billy Ray but he says, no, he does it out of respect.
“I’m like his mom now. I heard her say the other day Brett has got to retire and do this Hall of Fame thing or she’s going to be too old to go. We’re going to have to be in our walkers and wheelchairs for the ceremony if he doesn’t get there soon. I’ll tell you, though. He can still sling that sucker.”
That’s what has Saints fans worried tonight, especially those who live in Kiln and know Favre best.
“Either the hometown wins or the homeboy wins,” Bonita said. “Either way we’re going to the Super Bowl.”
No hard feelings. It’s only football, killing Kiln with more kindness than most towns could stand.
Edited: January 24th, 2010
Tuscaloosa has a Museum Especially for Children
Tuscaloosa is a county of the center west of Alabama, on the banks of the river Black Warrior; his capital is the city of the same name, which with his 83.000 inhabitants lodges universities, schools and important hospitals. The city has a predominantly industrial activity since it is the hearth of the plant of international assembly of Mercedes Benz who settled here in 1997, in that luxurious sports vehicles take place.
Precisely here, in Tuscaloosa, there is Childrens Hands-On Museum, CHOM, dedicated to personitas from 0 to 13 years that find here a space where to see but especially to touch, to create, to experiment and to discover. It presents twenty-one explanatory spaces organized in three plants so that the children could learn by means of the game things related to the everyday life, the history of the United States, the art, the health and much more.
For example, the children will meet a market of fruits and vegetables, where his favorites will be able to choose, take them, weigh them, buy them and pay them. Another interesting space is that of Captain Tim Parker, who explains the importance of the river in the life of the city, for the transport and the fishing. Also they will be able to visit a village of the tribe Choctaw, traveling about the year 1700 and experiencing the everyday life of the original peoples, realizing your own ceramics pieces and touching real animals skins.
The Study of Art allows them to explore the visual arts and others, compose your own compositions or sculptures, disguise itself, see a marionettes spectacle, and up to getting inside a kaleidoscope. A recreation of the city in the year 1872 will allow them to know the ancient life style: the bank, the barber’s shop, and to know the importance of the drugstores at the beginning of the XXth century. There waits also the recreation of a typical house of the Japan, with a beautiful garden for the meditation, for the forest and the beavers, and to finish, the attic of the grandmother offers them disguises and objects of the everyday life of the XIXth century.
The CHOM is a community museum, which was born in 1984 from an idea of the schools of the county of Tuscaloosa with support of the University of Alabama; his rooms are designed to stimulate the curiosity of the children about his community and his place in this one, with the participation of the adults. At present it is a space recognized by the community, it has big educational prestige and it is an important tourist destination.
It is very easy to come to Tuscaloosa across interstate routes from Birmingham, Mississippi and Northport; or in plane since it has its own airport. If the idea is to remain, the city is provided with an accommodations fan for all the budgets. Eating will not be a problem: there are tens restaurants of all the styles, bars and coffees.
Edited: January 24th, 2010
How to stay warm on those cold lonely nights away from home
No it’s not a hot toddy- the answer could be a “toasting suit” away.
Holiday Inn employees keep bed warm for happy customer in Surrey
Holiday Inn, operator of over 4,000 hotels worldwide, will begin to offer a free five-minute “human bed warming service” at it’s London Kensington hotel throughout next week.
If requested, a willing member of hotel staff will jump in your bed, dressed head to foot in an all-in-one sleeper suit, until your nightly chamber warms up.
“Like having a giant hot water bottle in your bed” is how Holiday Inn spokeswoman Jane Bednall described the idea.
Bed Warmers Jacqui Barry and Nick Woods (pictured) helped to beat the big freeze for Laurence Lancashire, centre, at the Holiday Inn Kingston-South in Surbiton, Surrey.
Dr Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre, said the idea could help people get off to sleep.
He said: “There’s plenty of scientific evidence to show that sleep starts at the beginning of the night when body temperature starts to drop.
“A warm bed – approximately 20 to 24C – is a good way to start this process whereas a cold bed would inhibit sleep.
“Holiday Inn’s new bed warmers service should help people achieve a good night’s sleep especially as it’s taking much longer for them to warm up when they come in from the snow.”
Edited: January 24th, 2010