I'm Baaaaaaaack.......

Still recovering from my recent jaunt down to Mobile. Brief impressions of the place:

- Lots of really beautiful architecture, most of it downtown. The place reminds me a lot of other southern cities I've been to such as Charleston and Beaufort.

- As with other such cities, the neighborhoods seem to be very jumbled. You can be strolling along a nice street and suddenly find yourself in a really scary looking place. Two minutes later, you're in a nice area again. Go figure.

- True to the South, most of the folks were extremely friendly. However, I ate lunch one afternoon at a brewpub on Dauphin Street and had a rude and snippy waitress. It was so out of character with everything else I witnessed that I was posivitely shocked.

- The Mobile Marriott is never going to reach star quality if water keeps welling up out of the bathroom sinks.

- I had to travel out into the back country some seventy or eighty miles from the city. There is still a lot of damage visible from the plastering the area took from Hurricane Ivan. Someone told me the damage was much worse because this was the first direct hit from a major storm in some especially lengthy span of years. I can readily believe it.

- Speaking of storms, I had to cross the delta of the Mobile River in a perfectly furious driving rain early Thursday morning. It is a very long causeway and features two bridges as well, one very tall, the other not so much. At the time, I began to think it rather absurd that I had been so stressed about flying, when my actual fate was going to be to get blown off a bridge in a car.

- There sure are a hell of a lot of lawyer's offices in Mobile, most of them comfortably ensconsed in the above-referenced beautiful houses.

- I didn't get to do much sightseeing, as the weather was pretty crummy the whole time. But I'm pretty sure I'll be going back, so hopefully will get another chance.