Oh, you know how much you've been waiting for it!

The anticipation building with each passing moment, seven whole days of pent up emotion--that can only be released with the Axis of Weevil Thursday Three, Ver. 3.0!

Yes, I realize that I said this was going to get posted late today after I got into the office, but I figured since I was already still awake typing up stuff for work as well as fascinating information on Richard Trevithick (the inventor of the steam locomotive), for a certain daughter of mine, I might as well go ahead and get this done, too.

So then, being that the South is known for the great and varied beauty of its landscape (as well as the physical ugliness of some parts that would make a scabby knee look good), we ask you to ponder and respond to these three treble-themed questions:

1) What three (3) Southern places, towns, or regions (aside from your own, if you currently reside in the South) do you think you would enjoy living in?

2) What 3 (three) Southern places, towns, or regions (aside from, &c., &c.) have you ever visited and would never want to set foot in again? (I make the special note that you must have actually visited there, mainly because some people have irrational negative opinions about places based entirely upon what they have heard from others. Nothing like first-hand experience.)

3) Finally, what are the three most distinctly Southern tourist traps you have ever visited?

Now then, go off and answer those, and leave a link down in the comments to your blog if you care to. Remember, Haloscan will let you insert hyperlinks using the normal pointy-brackets-and-"a href=" protocol if you want folks to be able to click over.

AS FOR ME and #1 -- I think all the time about how much I would like to live on Dauphin Island. Nothing to do but sit there and vegetate in the sun. And occasionally get blown away by hurricanes. I think Nashville, Tennessee is really a pretty town, especially out in the rural suburbs. And I also like Asheville, North Carolina a whole bunch, but that might stem from having gone there on my honeymoon.

For #2, the first choice would have to be Macon, Georgia. You have never seen a more depressing sight than to roll through circa 1982 Macon on a Greyhound bus on a miserably rainy winter day. Macon may actually be a nifty place, but that one experience sorta ruined it for me. The next place was one I visited with one of my friends from grade school, long ago. I'm not sure why, but he asked me to go with him and the rest of his family to visit one of his aunts and her husband, who lived in a trailer in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi. Nothing around but flat grassy nothingness. Spent the night there, playing Go Fish and reading a tattered copy of Grit. Never going to go back, let me tell you. The last place would have to be any place in rabid chipmunk Roger Bedford's State Senate district. Fine people all, I'm sure, and some nice towns, but any place this venal weasel calls home is no place I would want to live.

Now then, #3, tourist traps! Well, when I was young we went to a real live roadside gator farm in Florida that still gives me bad dreams, and then there is the Strip in Gatlinburg. (Note in the linked article that the first settlers were named Oglesby!) We used to go on vacation there almost every year when I was young, and the chief attraction--at least with my parents--was to park the car near the Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum and 'people watch.' Just sit there and observe the flowing tide of humanity. I think you probably can learn a lot that way. (By the way, don't miss Cooter's Place!) And I am proud to say I have visited the Spanish Castillo de San Marcos while in St. Augustine, Florida. That's not really a tourist trap, though--that honor was held by yet another Ripley's museum--for some reason, we could never take a vacation in any town without a Ripley museum. In any event, this particular Ripley's is where I, as a tender youth of only five, first became aware of my father's flatulent abilities. For the longest time, I never could figure out why my folks kept chuckling and talking about how bad that museum stank. Then they explained it to me. I may have inherited my looks from my mama's side of the family, but I am strictly my father's son when it comes to musicianship.

Anyway, there you go.
posted by Terry at 12:24:00 AM