Starting Home Pensacola to Birmingham

Children's climbing structure at Big Lagoon

Friday, October 22, 2010

We were up at 7:00 and left camp at 8:15…pretty good considering we enjoyed a cup of coffee before completely taking down and packing up camp. We drove over to the waterway side of the island just to see it in the daylight. There was a really cool play structure with numerous climbing walls that Daniel would have loved!

We took a road straight north from Gulf Shores to I-65 – interesting small towns in Alabama and land dotted with cotton fields, some sugar cane, pecan trees, and cattle. We took I-65 and headed through Montgomery and on to Birmingham. We stopped for gas, to buy pecans and for lunch at a rest area. It was a fairly boring day except for a good mystery on CD.

We arrived in Birmingham and the same Quality Inn we stayed at on the trip down. We caught up on internet and Jane searched for the information on the Japanese Restaurant, Sekisui, where we planned to eat dinner. We have been searching for a Japanese Restaurant with Sukiyaki on the menu for about a year. It was a little crazy finding it – GPS tried, Jane called and asked for directions…we kept looking and finally found it by looking UP…it was on the upper level of a several level shopping area.

Restaurant Signage on 2nd floor of Mall

Sukiyaki

Japanese seating area

It was a very nice and VERY Japanese restaurant. We had sushi, sukiyaki, and tempura bananas with ice cream for dessert. Ben had sake. Everything was excellent. We have now had sushi – neither of us hated it but we did not love it either….so it is one of those things we now know we have eaten and do not need to eat again but could if necessary! The waitress came over and talked to us for a long while, she was very interested in why we ordered sukiyaki – evidently very few Americans order it…and we had BOTH ordered it!

Tomorrow we head home and hope to see some nice tree color when back in Tennessee.