Happy Birthday Mike

• There are 9 boats going through one lock. We volunteered to raft off another boat, this way we could all get through faster. I started to talk to the guy that was holding onto our boat. He owns a dolphin boat in Alabama. Three times a day he takes groups out to see dolphins. He loves his job, the kids get so excited when they spot one. I told him I would get excited if I saw one. He also told me to enjoy the next few marinas because as you get further down the river they get pretty raunchy.
• At the next lock a very nice "rollie-pollie" lock master stopped to talk to me. He told me he would call ahead to the next lock and let them know we were on our way. I tried to keep a straight face and thanked him. I think we're all the same, when you pass a car accident, you don't want to look, but you do, you get annoyed at yourself for looking. Anyway, the lock master had a booger that was going in and out as he spoke to me, I couldn't keep my eyes off it. When he finished I wanted to laugh out loud, how can something like that strike me so funny. I wonder, should I have told him...
• He wasn't kidding when he said the marinas would get bad. It's Mikes birthday, let's have a special dinner. Turns out its a dry county. A dry, dry county. You can't even bring your own bottle into the restaurant. Picture the cafeteria in the worst sense. Formica tables, hard fold up chairs and no air-conditioning. That was his special dinner. You did get free ice tea refills, the tea was served in mason jars.
• I didn't have the heart to have the waitress sing happy birthday...
• Next place we stayed was even funnier. You must remember, when you stay at a marina in Alabama it costs anywhere from $.65 a foot to $1.00 a foot, so rather than drop an anchor, you can have electric and know you won't get hit by a barge. I'm really not being fresh, but I guess I would never want to live here. The people are as nice as can be. They just live a different, a more simple life. I don't like to go in a place that's like an out-house. I turned on the faucet and orange water came out.
• We took the courtesy car to go on a little excursion. We were told that there may be a slight problem with the car, they thought they had bad gas. The car had over 240,000 miles on it. Mike said there's nothing wrong with the gas, it needs a new engine. Anyway, it wouldn't go over 10 miles an hour, when you went downhill it did go up to 35mph. We kept having to pull over to let trucks pass us. All I could think of was "Little Miss Sunshine", I'll soon have to get out and push. It would buck and jerk and buck again. It was like riding a bronco. We did have a lot of laughs, the fear was breaking down when we had no bars on our cell phone.
• We went to the Tom Bevill visitor center at Pickensville. A reproduction of the once elegant plantation houses is the first thing you see. You walk through it and can picture Scarlett coming down the stairs. Onto the Snagboat Montgomery. Both the house and the boat are museums of river folklore and history. Remember when Tammy gave the tour in "Tammy and the Bachelor", that's what it was like.
• We made it home safe, just another adventure, that we will never forget.