6th Stop - Birmingham (Sweat Home Alabama)
Blog Post #13 - Written May 31, 2025
Stay: May 14-16, 2025
Our next stop along our southern journey to the panhandle of Florida was Birmingham, AL. We stayed at the Cherokee Campground & RV Park in Helena. This campground was interesting in that it offers attractive long-term pricing ($540/mo, which includes electric, water, and sewer! not bad really...) so we met a lot of long term campers here, some of whom have been here for 8 years! 😲 But hey, I get it, it has a private fishing lake the kids had fun splashing in and catching frogs at, a rec room with free books, movies, workout equipment, puzzles, and even some putt-putt golf!
Our first full day here we explored Red Mountain Park, which looked and sounded really cool online, and probably was really cool in it's hay-day, but is now kinda run-down and decrepit looking. Which is a shame, because the closed-off portions we saw would've been awesome if they were up and running! Like a huge climbing tower, ropes course, ziplines, etc. But it was still lots of fun and we mountain biked a bunch of it. We discovered that every Eagle Scout in the Birmingham Alabama area does their Eagle Project here haha, and we found some old abandoned mines and a cool treehouse.
We then drove into town to meet up with our friend Melissa that we met at the Singing Hills campground by Mammoth Cave (she's the one that left us a note when she left, take a look at our Mammoth Cave blog post). We played at a little neighborhood park and checked out their library before meeting Melissa for ice cream at Edgewood Creamery. It was so fun to see her again and the kids just adore her haha. They also had way too much fun scrounging around the floor and corners of the ice cream parlor looking for loose change. 🙈 Everyone's ice cream was good, but mine was the best...Mexican Hot Chocolate flavor. They hit it on the nose; the cinnamon and hint of cayenne peeper was perfect! 😋
The next day we visited Oak Mountain State Park. It's a huge place with lots to do, but we didn't have time for most of it. So we basically just went to the Alabama Wildlife Center to see the raptors, which was awesome! They have a treetop canopy boardwalk around the lower enclosures and then a fun little hike up to the aviary. We saw a bunch of owls, eagles, hawks, vultures, and more. We even got to follow the volunteer, Sheila, around as she fed them their rats! She was very sweet to wait for our slow selves and even gave each of the boys a feather from the birds. She's volunteered one a day a week here for 7 years and loves it. She also taught us why you shouldn't throw food out the window as you drive along. Even if you think it's biodegradable, the problem is it attracts rats and other small animals to the road, which in turn attracts these birds of prey to roads, where they get hit by cars and killed or injured.
Neat Person Spotlight #6: I'm going to cheat on this one and give you 3. I obviously have to give Melissa a shout out, and wish her the best on their upcoming boondocking trip to Lake Tahoe! And Sheila was so nice, and doing something she loves with the birds, something I would enjoy doing someday too! Lastly, we met a friendly guy whose name escapes me now, who was staying at the same campground while working a tree removal job. We saw this huge truck at the end of our row in the campground (I initially thought someone had converted a big garbage truck into an RV haha) and went down to check it out. He let us climb up and look inside, and explained how the business works (a lot of government contracts for big, long jobs like 2 months clearing land for a new line/section of utilities, or hurricane clean up. And it pays pretty well. If you're willing to put in the work and time, this kind of 'dirty job' can pull in close to $200k a year!
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