Day 26: Lost Luggage

Today was going to be a short(er) drive of 3 hours so we opted to take the more scenic route and avoid the interstate all together. We drove through beautiful redneck country into northeastern Alabama to a small town called Scottsboro and stopped for the most amazing Fried Chicken at a local place called Liberty Restaurant.

The sweet potatoes, turnip greens, and string beans must have all been cooked with some form of pork fat and were delicious. It was here that we also had our first piece of Lemon Ice Box Pie- a less sweet Lemon Meringue minus the meringue. The locals at the restaurant gave us a few glances sideways, but the waitress and owner were really nice to us, having noticed our California license plate and wanting to insure we had a decent time in their little town. Decent it was. Better than decent. Only a on a cross country trip would I ever have the excuse to drive through rural Alabama. This is one of the many joys of the trip so far- seeing bits of the country I would never see otherwise. I've learned some of the local customs, tasted local cuisine, and slowly adopted the dialects and accents of the hills and valleys around me. I have loved stopping every two hundred miles or so and hearing the accents morph from town to town. The scenery has been pretty much the same for the last few days, but the sounds change.

The "real" reason we were in Scottsboro was to go shopping at the Unclaimed Baggage Center.

Every piece of lost luggage from the nation's airlines ends up here to be sold off for a song. Imagine a department store full of used items and an unusual amount of luggage and that's what it's like. They had a little bit of everything and sometimes a lot of everything. Electronics, clothes, sporting equipment, jewelry, toys, etc.They advertise 7,000 new items a day and recommend stopping in multiple times to see what's new. We had a couple of hours and that was enough for me, though if I lived here (I won't be) I'd be there every day. I found an awesome bejeweled white Fez ($6) and a sweet pair of designer jeans ($20.) Justine got some jeans herself, a tie, a hat and a big white belt. I seriously toyed with getting a used Raiders Bowling Ball, but thought the better of it given that I probably won't use it and that it would only add weight to the car for the remainder of the trip. They also had a myriad of iPods for dirt cheap, but as we already own 3 between the two of us, didn't need to buy another one. There was a beautiful sadness to the place mixed with shoppers joy in finding great deals on someone else's lost luggage. They also had a "museum" of lost items they found including ancient Egyptian artifacts that they auctioned off at Christie's and puppet/props from the Henson/ILM movie Labyrinth.

How can you lose Hoggle? I guess losing things is common in a labyrinth so it was only fitting.

After Scottsboro, we drove across the Tennessee border and stopped in Lynchburg, TN at the Jack Daniels distillery.

Sadly, they were closing so we missed out on a tour, but the grounds were beautiful. With a bit of Irony we learned that Lynchburg is a dry town in a dry county in Tennessee dating back to pre-prohibition, but they drafted an exemption for Jack Daniels.

America, Fuck Yeah!

written by

JRadhirsch on September 26, 2008 from Scottsboro, United States

from the travel blog: The Great American Road Trip

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Oh. My. God. That's my shopping heaven. You just added something new to my Places To Visit Before I Die list.

written by

Koala Bear on September 29, 2008

The exemption is that they can sell you a bottle that you can take home. They only serve lemonade after the tour :-( but they do flap the covers on the aging bins so you get a very good whiff of the real stuff - makes your eyes water real good.

written by G-Off on September 29, 2008

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