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I said I might update during our trip, and so, from the luxurious confines of the Super 8 motel in Moody, AL (a little town a few minutes outside of Birmingham), I’m doing just that.  Yeah, that’s right, I said "motel" instead of "the home of Minnie’s cousin."  We didn’t get in touch with her yesterday, or on the way down here for that matter.  At least, not until we’d already checked into our room.  Yeah, awesome.  Total clusterfuck.  We even wound up going to some other house where, according to some internet database Minnie’s sister checked for us back home, somebody with the same name as Mininie’s cousin lived.  But it wasn’t her, so we had an interesting encounter with the confused resident. 

As I mentioned, we did, at long last, get in touch with Jennifer (that’s her name, after all), as I said, after we had checked into this lovely $50 a night room.  So they had a laugh over the whole thing, and we’ll apparently be staying with her the rest of our time. Turns out she wasn’t even home today anyway, and to my understanding may not be there until noon tomorrow. 

On the upside, we saw some pretty cool stuff today.  I may have mentioned it previously, but Birmingham is home to the largest cast iron statue in the world, and at 56 feet tall, the statue of Vulcan, Roman god of the forge, is a pretty damn awe-inspiring sight.  I’ll upload a couple of pictures in a future entry… I took all the pics with my phone, so besides being not the best quality, they’re also, you know, on the phone, and I don’t feel like messing around with the SD card tonight. 

We also visited the Botanical Gardens.  It was nearly 5:00 when we got there though, and we were tired (but still hadn’t found out whether we’d need a motel room) so we only visited the Japanese garden section.  More pics there, and there will likely be plenty more from where ever else we gos overr the next couple of days, so expect a pic heavy entry in the future.

Good night from the Moody  Super 8, and hopefully next entry will be from somewhere besides here.  I have a feeling Minnie’s cousin will not have wifi, so if I write again before we get home it may be from a Subway or something similar.