Our first night in Montgomery, we ate dinner here. It was excellent. It has a lot of bad reviews on Urbanspoon, but we had a delightful dinner and good food (delicious meatballs!) when we were there.

After dinner, we walked around the downtown area a little and saw an interesting building across a parking lot from the hotel, which turned out to be this. After breakfast the next day, we walked over. It's a BEAUTIFUL old building, carved ornate woodwork, stained glass above every transom, even in the railroad shed. The docent told us about a trolley tour they run of the downtown area for $1, driving around showing historical landmarks. You can get off at various points such as the Capitol building or Rosa Parks Museum, tour that place and get picked up by the trolley in an hour. Well, they call it a trolley but it's really a small charter bus.

We decided why not, it’s only a buck each. On the trolley with us were a foreign chick all by herself and two moms with two or three kidlets each. The moms/kids sat at the very back (thank all the gods), we were on one side kinda toward the front and the foreign chick was on the other side a little ahead. The deal was, a DVD played about Montgomery history and was paused as we neared particular sites, at which point the driver took over with a mike and told some facts about that site. It was pretty interesting – like in addition to historic landmarks like the Confederate White House there were more…well, I guess it’s an historical landmark too but in a different sort of category – she pointed out the barbershop where MLK got his last haircut before being assassinated, a famous restaurant that’s been there for nearly a century, things like that.

This puzzled me more than annoyed me: those two moms at the back NEVER shut up, the entire time. They weren't talking about things we were seeing on the tour, either, like, "Oh, that's a lovely old house" - no, there was a steady stream of “I know, right? And then he…”, “Oh so I told Allison...”, "Really? What did he say to that?" blah blah blah blah blah blah blah to eleventy the entire freakin' time. There was no way either of them or any of the kidlets heard ONE SINGLE syllable of either the DVD or anything the driver said. They even made it difficult for us to hear, and we were much closer to the front. Now I like to chat with my buds too, but what in the hell was the point of going on an historic tour if you weren’t going to listen to a damn thing about any of it?!? If you’re not at least marginally interested in history, why go? Take the kids to an ice cream shop and gossip over coffee. It was amazing, and not in a good way. Forty, forty-five minutes and they never shut up or took in a single word.

There is an even better story about the trolley tour. Tomorrow I will write about the frantic couple.