Birmingham, AL
Alabama invented white barbecue sauce, and Saw's is Birmingham's modern shrine to it. The name is the founder's high school nickname: Mike Wilson, Sorry Ass Wilson, a Carolina-born, culinary-schooled Cooking Light test-kitchen chef whose backyard smoking got so good he took over a closing Homewood barbecue joint in 2009 and had lines out the door within weeks. Publications from Men's Journal to Paula Deen Magazine called it the best barbecue in America. Wilson died in 2020, still in his forties; his teenage kids inherited the original, and the family still guards his sauce and rub recipes. Closest to the field is Saw's Soul Kitchen in Avondale, about ten minutes, home of the epic pork 'n greens over grits; the Homewood original is fifteen. Order smoked chicken drowned in white sauce either way, and split a stuffed baked potato the size of a football.
Named for civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. Birmingham's role in the civil rights movement is visible from the air — the 16th Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park are downtown.
A civilian aviation museum near Birmingham holding nearly 100 aircraft and the Alabama Aviation Hall of Fame — and one airplane with a story unlike any other in the collection. In 1943 a B-25C Mitchell bomber went down in Lake Murray, South Carolina during a training exercise; the crew escaped, and the bomber sank to 150 feet, where it sat for sixty-two years and became a dive site. In 2005 a salvage team raised it from the bottom of the lake. Those recovered remains are now conserved and displayed here — a WWII bomber that spent most of its existence underwater. The rest of the museum runs from early flight through the jet age, with a Tuskegee Airmen focus fitting for Alabama.
East of Birmingham, a 2.66-mile paved oval sits in the Alabama woods; Talladega, the longest and fastest track in NASCAR, with turns banked at 33 degrees. From the air the banking is the tell; the track is not flat like a road, it is tilted up at the edges into a shallow bowl. It was built in 1969 on top of a former airfield, and the infield still has an airstrip. The tri-oval shape, the acres of parking, the grandstands stacked along the front straight; there is no mistaking it for anything else once you are over it.
Huntsville is where Wernher von Braun and his team built the rockets that reached the Moon, and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center is where that story is told — the official visitor center for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, a Smithsonian affiliate, and the home of Space Camp. The crown jewel is real: the Saturn V Dynamic Test Vehicle (SA-500D), a National Historic Landmark, lies on its side full-length inside the Davidson Center so you can walk the entire 363 feet of moon rocket. Outside, a full-scale Saturn V replica stands vertical as a landmark visible for miles. Also here: Pathfinder, the world's only full-stack Space Shuttle display, an Apollo command module, and more than 1,500 artifacts.
Downtown Montgomery, Alabama holds the densest concentration of Civil Rights Movement sites in the U.S. At the corner of Dexter Avenue and South Court Street, the Rosa Parks Museum stands at the bus-stop site where Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955 — the act that launched the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott led by a 26-year-old new pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. Five blocks east on Dexter Avenue stands the brick Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where King preached his first sermon as pastor in 1954 and where the Montgomery Improvement Association (organizing the boycott) was founded. The Alabama State Capitol on the hill at the top of Dexter Avenue is where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as Confederate President (February 18, 1861) AND where the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March ended — Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice 1.5 miles south in 2018; the memorial holds 800 hanging steel columns inscribed with the names of 4,400+ documented lynching victims by county. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where state troopers attacked marchers on "Bloody Sunday" March 7, 1965, is 47 miles west.