"Are you kin?" "No, I'm Paul, he's Ken"

We started out in the morning by finding our way across Mobile Bay to the battleship  USS Alabama. The ship is in a park along with the submarine USS Drum and a variety of military planes and other ships. Battleships were huge and had a crew of about 2,500 sailors and marines. Having that many people on board required a huge infrastructure and the services of a small city. The ship is like a maze and they have designated three different self-guided tours. We spent about two hours in/on the Alabama and didn't see everything. At one point Paul and I got separated on one of the interior decks and didn't locate each other for a half hour.

Even though it is a huge ship, it was crowded and conditions were cramped. There were hatches and stairways leading up and down through the decks. I was having trouble managing the stairways. I'd need about four days advance warning of a call to battle stations so I could find my way and clamber up or down the stairs.

There are four huge gun turrets and dozens of other smaller guns ranging from cannons and anti-aircraft guns down to smaller machine guns. The inside of the large turrets have a residual gunpowder smell similar to the smell of cap pistols when I was a kid. There are huge springs set up around the supporting base of the turrets to help absorb the recoil when the cannons were fired. The sound must have been deafening.

The other large ship is the USS Drum, a WW-II era submarine. I've been on a submarine once before and this one seems a little larger but it is still incredibly
cramped. I can't imagine a crew of several dozen men living and working in such a tight space. The captain is the only person with a private space. Everyone below captain had to share space and even share bunks. On the battleship, some sailors, like the ship's barbers, had their bunks in their work space and a little more room.

The submarine's torpedo room was not very large and would have been filled with torpedoes and a few bunks for the lucky sailors who slept there.

The submarine was powered by diesel engines that also produced electricity stored in the batteries. The ship ran on battery power when it was submerged. The air inside one of these submarines was stale and smelled of diesel fumes, cooking smells and the general smell of the crew. Must have been a joy to get fresh air once in a while.

From the picture you can see that people were constrained by the tight spaces and I was definitely having trouble getting through the hatches going from one section to another. In movies they show sailors moving around through the hatches like it was no problem at all.  Maybe it takes practice.

We were late getting away from Mobile since we spent most of the morning touring the two ships and looking at the military planes.  We headed toward home through rural Mississippi to Hattiesburg and Jackson. I'm always surprised at how empty Mississippi is. Population density is about 63 people per square mile in Mississippi compared to 86 in Missouri and 92 in Alabama but large areas of the state seem to be empty.

We stopped for a fast food lunch in Hattiesburg. While we were eating one of the workers stopped at our table and asked Paul "Are you kin?" We didn't quite understand the question because she was speaking Mississippian but Paul finally said (seriously) "No, I'm Paul...He's Ken". She looked puzzled and asked again and we finally figured out what the question was. She said that we looked alike and wanted to know if we were related. Then we had to explain that my name was Ken and he was Paul and we were brothers....and yes, we were kin. Our language fails us once again.

So on we drove. We got to Memphis and decided to go ahead and try to get all the way home to St. Louis. We stopped for supper in West Memphis and ran into a driving rain storm as we tried to get back on the highway. We got turned around a little but finally headed north again on I-55. It was slow going in the rain but we finally got out of it as we crossed into Missouri.  We stopped to walk around a few times and tried to stay awake. In Ste. Genevieve we got out to stretch our legs (at about midnight) and were shocked at the temperature. We went from about 65 degrees to  35 windy degrees in about 50 miles of driving.....that woke us up a little.

It was after 1 AM when we got to Paul's in St. Louis and collapsed into bed. I got started again in the morning and was back home around noon on Monday. It was a good trip and very relaxing. I got rid of a lot of my stored up stress from selling my house and moving. We joked about not doing anything or how dead and laid back everything was but that was exactly what we wanted.

My travelling companion...
yes, we do look alike