Sweet Home Alabama

H and I are a retired couple with 41+ years of marriage under our belts, who have just recently made the anticipated move from Northern Virginia to central Alabama to build our dream home. This “blog” is a way to share our adventure with those of you who have heard us talk about it for the past 4 years! In case you are wondering about the mixed up blog title...I'll explain. Some dear friends of ours gave us a tote bag with these words written on it filled with all things from Virginia for us to have in the car on our trip down south. The words had a lot of meaning since this will be Home Sweet Home in Sweet Home Alabama and I decided to use this combination to name this blog HOME SWEET ALABAMA.

When we arrived in Alabama the last day of June 2010,
we found ourselves, to quote our son-in-law, “dirt poor”! By that, I mean, back in 2006, we bought two thirds of an acre with about 340 feet of water front property on Lake Mitchell in Alabama and right now, DIRT is all we have!

For those of y'all interested...Lake Mitchell is located on the Coosa River near Verbena, Alabama.  Mitchell Dam is located on Lake Mitchell. It is the second oldest of 14 Alabama Power Company hydroelectric generating plants. The dam was named for James Mitchell, an Alabama Power Company president from 1912 to 1920.
And for those of you wondering just where in the h… is Lake Mitchell. It is located just off I-65 and 10 miles due east of the city of Clanton* located in central Alabama. On your map, *Clanton is located between Birmingham and Montgomery.  This may be more information than  you might want to know but as I have often referred to us moving to the “dam” lake... you now know why!

WHY ALABAMA? H was born in Mobile, Alabama and my father’s family was from Gadsden, Alabama. H live in Mobile until he was 16 and I lived in Decatur, Alabama for about a year while my father was employed at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. Due to his sudden death, my family moved back to Tennessee where my mother was from. H moved to Memphis due to a job change for his father. That being said, we both had strong ties to this part of the world and decided this was where we would retire. We had always thought we would live a little farther south because of our love for the Gulf but little things (mainly Hurricanes in the past few years) prompted us to look farther up “north”. Visiting friends on Lake Mitchell helped pinpoint our retirement home.

The first weeks of July have had us on the go visiting family…mainly because from where we live now, we can! For the first time in more than 30 years, we live within a day's drive to most of our family. We have family members, as well as our daughter, in Atlanta ( approximately 3 ½ hours), family members in Memphis (5 hours) and family members in Florida (10+ hours). We both have extended family members in LA (referred to in this part of the country as…Lower Alabama).