Last Week's Field Visits

Last week's field visits began with a day-trip to Dothan. Not much to say about this trip other than we ate at Larry's BBQ. Last week was our second week on "phase 1" of the South Beach Diet, and you're supposed to eat salads for lunch during this first phase. I had Larry's Special with pork -- a chef's salad with pork meat. I had never tried a pork salad before, but I dumped some BBQ sauce (which technically you aren't supposed to eat on the diet) and light Ranch dressing and then mixed the two. It was really good!

Those who know me well know I'm a huge fan of BBQ! It was really hard to pass up the usual pork platter with two sides, but the salad was good.



Thursday our first stop was in Columbus, MS. Columbus is a town with some very beautiful areas and they are doing some nice work to renovate their downtown. (What Smalltown USA city doesn't need a little "downtown renovation" anyway???) There are a lot of old homes that have been restored in the city.

One of the "tragedies" of these trips is that we often don't have time to stop along the way and take pictures. I would've liked to have some from Columbus.

From there we traveled to Elvis' birth-city, Tupelo. We headed west through downtown Tupelo, and one of the first things I noticed in Tupelo is the BancorpSouth Center -- which is a fairly large arena, especially for Tupelo. Tupelo is not exactly a "huge" town or anything.

Among a wide array of concerts and other events, the BancorpSouth Center is home to the Mississippi Mudcats, an American Indoor Football Association (AIFA) arena football team. (The Mudcats compete with our own Montgomery Bears -- hey, at least it isn't named "Biscuits".)

After a few hours of not-worth-mentioning-here "work stuff" in Tupelo, we headed back to the great state of Alabama (queue up "Sweet Home") -- but not headed home. No...we're too interesting for that. ;- No, we were headed for Florence.

When you take the trip from Tupelo to Florence, you travel the Natchez Trace Parkway. (<-- Check out the link...it's really cool.) According to the National Park Service: "The 444-mile Natchez Trace Parkway commemorates an ancient trail that connected southern portions of the Mississippi River, through Alabama, to salt licks in today's central Tennessee."

"There are many preserved sections of the Old Natchez Trace that can been visited along the Parkway. [The one pictured above] is found at Milepost 222 in north Mississippi." (Looks like a scene from Sleepy Hollow, huh?)

There are some interesting stories about the history of the Trace at http://www.nps.gov/natr/stories.htm. Unfortunately we didn't have time to stop and take pictures. As we traveled the route I was reminded of the awesome power and creativity of The Creator.

Once we made it to the hotel in Florence, we went directly to our favorite restaurant in town: Ricatoni's Italian Grill. This is a locally-owned restaurant and the food is fantastic! I highly recommend it, and apparently so do a lot of other people.

That's about all the interesting stuff on this trip. We ate at a BBQ place the following day for lunch and took the long trek back to Montgomery. It was a tiring, but profitable trip.