After a very very long day traveling from dad in Shreveport we finally arrived in Montgomery with me so sick I could hardly see. Finding a motel we signed up for a month, I parked the trailer and crashed. This was our first experience with an out of town illness and by far the most severe. Big question is how do you find a doctor willing to take a temporary medicare patient? Turns out the local hospital was having the same issue with people clogging up the emergency room and opened a series of walk-in clinics. Walk in, plug your life history in the terminal, wait fifteen minutes and the doctor is available. I must report we were were very pleased with the treatment and the cost was reasonable even after I was so generous as to pass it on to Lori.
For several years now I have been joking that Montgomery is a great place to be sick because there is absolutely nothing to do. That is not quite true as we found starting with the old train depot that has been converted to a very nice convention and visitors center with the original 1897 train shed covering the parking area.
Just to the southwest of the visitors center is a large parking garage hosting a walkway over the operating rail line allowing access to riverfront park with a concert area and the stern wheel tour boat that operates in the warmer months. Here in January the weather is rather raw for being on the river.
As a measure of how sick I was I don't remember taking these photographs of the fountain at Courthouse Square and the Central Bank Building behind it. Thanks to the modern miracle of Google Earth I could identify this as the west end of Dexter Avenue while the State Capitol Building is at the eastern end along with the wonderful history museum.
One of the most memorable moments at the Capitol was trying to get a good picture of this large red tail hawk sitting on one of the light fixtures. Since this picture I have upgraded the camera but even more important moved to the higher grade professional lenses; heaver, more expensive, but better results.
Now I'll finish up this visit to Montgomery with some places I really can't identify. Later in our travels I have incorporated the GPS coordinates into my photographs so I know where they were taken. These were from before I got so refined and have run into this situation more than once. It's Montgomery, but where?
I think this is Blount Cultural Park showing the look of a raw and wet southern winter. The park does contain the free Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts which is a wonderful warm place to spend a miserable wet cold day. According to a photo posted on Google Maps the center photo is a shrine temple at Riverfront Park which does not show up on street view so I'm not sure what or where is is other than nice. My dad's girlfriend talked about the house where she grew up in southern Louisiana so I just had to capture this classic view.
One of the really fun places in Montgomery is the MOOseum operated by the Alabama Cattlemen's Association. When you only have lemons you make lemonade; when you have a lot of worn-out cotton fields that only grow grass you raise cattle. Regenerates the land, good profit, and they are smart enough to sell the cattle to out of state feedlots and avoid the stink. This naturally leads me into the Montgomery Zoo which is covered on this other page.