Great ride report Terry. Beautiful area back there. Like many places in this country, until I see photos, I just never had any idea......
I see you got the multi pics per post thing going. 
Yea, JC....I was trying to over complicate it, as usual. Trying to use the tag button on here and then copy the link, instead of just simply pasteing. Finally figured it out though...

Many people have a picture in their head about a place, and a lot of times it's wrong. Alabama's official "line" is "Alabama The Beautiful", and it really is a pretty state geographically. Very different in the Northern half than the lower half, but each has it's own kind of beauty. While I've always been a mountain person, our Gulf Coast has some of the prettiest beaches you'll find anywhere in the world, as has been reported in many travel magazines. Politically and culturally? That's a different story. The Birmingham area, and north of here in Huntsville, are probably the two most diverse cities in the state...Huntsville because of it's NASA past, and Birmingham because of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which is one of the premier medical facilities in the entire country, with a lot of medical research, and being a teaching hospital. Birmingham is not too big and not too small, with a lot of Southern Hospitality still left, and plenty of things to do, depending on one's interests.