North through Alabama

Thursday May 26^th

Got up bright and early to make the last rental car change.  This was a brilliant one - $39 for a week, thanks to Elise finding us the 1$ a day deal with Dollar rental car.  By the time they added on tax etc. it came to a little more but still – A Bargain!  We can only take it for a week though, so we have to be in NY by the 2nd June.

Road between Mobile and Alabama. Forested 4-lane highway all the way.

We were also pleased to find that both the drop-off and the pick-up were from the airport, so, extra convenient.  Our latest acquisition is a Ford Fusion which gives us a greater presence on the road than our previous micro cars.

Dire weather warnings all day so we raced to Montgomery ahead of the thunderstorms but they caught up with us in the end.  However, none of the fabled golf-ball hailstones although I overheard someone saying she’d caught some. 

The weather cleared up in the evening so we had a look around Montgomery which seems a very affluent place with nice parks.   Montgomery is the capital city of Alabama.

 1000 miles to go! 

The Ku Klux Klan is strong in Alabama which was of the last states to enfranchise the African American population.  To be fair, you needed to be able to pay the poll tax and pass a literacy test to vote so that eliminated many white folk also. But he African Americans were hardest hit as there were a lot of exemptions for white people.  This injustice was only rectified in 1965 with the voting rights act.  Some say there is still evidence of racial discrimination in the South in that approximately one third of all young African American men are in jail, on parole or probation.  The number of prison inmates has been increasing in the USA whereas in other western countries, it has changed little.  However, there are many African American high achievers also so maybe things are changing slowly.