A night in Monroeville and driving through Alabama

I feel a bit guilty about taking a detour of four hours from our holiday to Monroeville, the 'literary capital of Alabama'. There really isn't much there: Mel's Dairy Dream is now where Harper Lee and Truman Capote's houses used to be; there's the old courthouse which is now a museum, and three bronze statues of Scout, Jem and Dill. Across the road the shops are derelict. It was certainly a contrast to the hubbub of New Orleans.

For breakfast I made the error of putting maple syrup on what I thought was porridge but tasted like chicken and bacon soup (and turned out to be gravy for your biscuits). Thinking of it, Walter Cunningham does something similar in Chapter 3 of To Kill a Mockingbird.

We drove back through Alabama stopping at Doc's for lunch. Doc is an enormous man who had enormous billboards all along the motorway badgering us to go into his Country Store until we finally relented. It was very good.

We're now in Ocala, Florida, on our way to the Keys for the beach part of the holiday.