We left Huntsville at about 10 AM with the intention of driving for a relatively short amount of time today, to Atlanta, which should have been about a four hour drive. We had planned on stopping on the way, likely at Little River Canyon National Preserve, in northeastern Alabama and we planned on eating at a Seasons 52 restaurant outside of Atlanta for dinner. Only 5 minutes after leaving the hotel, we got sidetracked. Jackie was driving and as we were passing downtown Huntsville, Chris saw out the window the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus train parked on the tracks just off to the side of the highway. This was an unusual treat because there are only two Ringling Bros. circus trains that travel around the country at any given time and we just happened upon one of them. The Ringling Bros. circus travels around by train. The whole circus takes the train, animals included! When the circus comes to town, if the arena where they are performing is not right up against the tracks they will march the animals down the street to wherever it is they are performing (elephants too). They usually do this at night and it happens everywhere they go, even when they perform at Madison Square Garden! We got off the next exit, circled around and took some pictures. We only saw the part of the train that people sleep in, the animal cars must have been parked a little closer to the arena. After we took our pics, we headed out again. After we made our way through Scottsboro (without stopping to check out unclaimed baggage), and across the Tennessee River, we were well on our way. Since all we really ate for breakfast was leftover hushpuppies from last night, we were starting to get hungry. As we approached Ft. Payne, AL we heard something on the radio calling our names. We heard the radio station that we had just tuned into broadcasting from the National Cornbread Festival. Since we had no idea where they were broadcasting from, we decided that if this festival was within an hour’s drive, we were going. When would we have another chance to go to the Cornbread Festival? What the heck is the Cornbread Festival anyway? They said South Pittsburgh, TN, which was definitely under an hour so we went for it. Sure, this was an hour out of the way, which meant 2 hours out of the way (there and back) but we were going. We took a detour up I-59 back towards Chattanooga, then east on I-24 to S. Pittsburgh. Along the way we found some more relatively cheap gas ($3.59) so we filled up again. We found a guy selling parking spaces for $5 only a couple of blocks from the festival so we took him up on his offer. We thought it be better to pay $5 to park then to sit in traffic for a half hour for a free spot. The entrance had a huge cow to greet us and the festival was packed with people. They had just about every kind of street food available, deep fried everything (pizza, cheesecake, oreos, etc), tons of tents with people selling every kind of jelly, jam, and crafts you could think of. We were suckered in. We bought fried pickles, cornbread salad (which was actually pretty good), cornbread and pinto beans, salsa cornbread and some jellies. We even picked up a recipe or two for cornbread. They had rides and games too, just like any other carnival or fair. Chris wanted to enter a contest to see who can eat the most dry corn bread but there probably wasn't enough water on this earth to wash that stuff down. After spending a couple of hours there and getting some pretty good sunburn, we headed out. With the amount of sunburn we got Jackie later commented that we had now spent enough time in the south that we too are Rednecks.
Cornbread Salad:
Salsa cornbread:
Proof we were there:
After leaving the festival we headed back to our intended route. We got to the park about an hour and a half later. The Little River Canyon is the deepest canyon east of the Mississippi River. When we got to the preserve, we stopped to take a picture of the Little River Falls. We then drove down the Little River Canyon Rim Parkway, which isn’t a parkway at all, but a narrow road that winds its way along the rim of the canyon. We stopped a few times for pictures at viewpoints and we got a picture of a large mushroom shaped rock formation that the road was built around. We might have stayed longer in this park, or at least drove down the road a little further had we not gone to the Cornbread Festival, but still, we had a blast.
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