Recently in adventures Category

The morning of February 12, 2010, snow flurries descended on Birmingham, with no sign of stopping for several hours. At Steva's suggestion, the DavisDenny gang seized a rare opportunity for a Winter Wonderland group photo.

Of course, this was before the snow really hit Birmingham, carpeting the Magic City in white. Hours later, children would be sledding down the hill in Caldwell Park, and rolling massive white boulders around to make honest-to-God, full-grown snowmen, towering giants rarely seen in these parts. And it's still coming down.

Happy Valentine's Day, Birmingham.

Next Tuesday is my birthday.  We are going to visit my daughter at Warren Wilson College and go to a Wilco show.  I saw them at the Alabama Theater on the night they won a Grammy and if they play anything like they did that night, they will officially become A Band To See Twice.
 
Anyway, Warren Wilson is about five miles from Asheville, North Carolina.  It is on an organic farm and the students MUST work 15 hours per week on campus doing everything from cleaning bathrooms to running a printing press to ploughing. They must have 300 hours of community service to graduate. Not to mention the challenging academics in both traditional and progressive courses.  I mean, you can get a degree in Peace Studies there taught by a professor who conceived the Reconciliation Courts after the rotting of South African apartheid. 

I think that studying peace is a noble pursuit.

This is the kind of stuff that happens in Asheville.

I have been there many times since my first trip from Chapel Hill a long time ago.  When I go there Tuesday, I have no reason to believe much has changed and that will be of great comfort to me.  Asheville has a vibe.  Like New Orleans has a vibe.  Like Barcelona has a vibe.  They are different vibes, mind you, and each distinct.  But Asheville is a small town by almost any standard, far and away smaller than the above vibesites.  It may even be smaller than, say, Chattanooga, but I'm not sure.
 
Asheville is populated by young and old hippies, dastardly bankers, trim business men and women, farmers and crafts people who make useful things like drawer handles, books, natural organic local food and lots of other useful items. The retirees mostly live in cabins on hills or mountains surrounding the city proper.  Their minor league baseball team's name is The Tourists, but many who visit from elsewhere never get past The Biltmore.

Asheville's vibe is local.

Local food.  Local merchants. Local talent.  Locally made things.

And local beer.  Here's the marketing part you thought we'd never get to.
A local brewery, Pisgah, is located in the village of Black Mountain, near the foot of the Swannanoa Valley about seven miles from Asheville.  A couple of organic brewers set up shop and began making really good beer.  I don't think they entered it in one of these competitions other breweries work to win so they can say so in their advertising and packaging.  It took these guys about a year to get everything like they wanted it, selling a little here and there to keep the hops coming.  Pretty soon, they had regular customers and delivered the beer in a pickup purchased locally.  Demand ran up, and these local fellows had some decisions to make:  "Do we invest in trucks for delivery?  Do we buy more stuff in which to make more beer?  Can we afford more employees so we can get home before 3:00 a.m. every damn day?"

So this is what they did.  They decided to limit their sales footprint to Buncombe County only and hired a local designer to develop an appropriate label and package.  Nothing over the top.

In less than a year, they were outselling Budweiser.  People were driving in from other counties to buy Asheville's local beer.  Everybody from farmers to dental hygienists were drinking Pisgah.
 
Local people supporting local products.  That's genius.  It never started as any kind of an organized Support Your Local _________ Movement.  It doesn't have a leader and is not governed by a committee.  The truth is, buying local is what Asheville and many other places, large and small, really want.  There are several good, sound reasons to buy local:  there's the freshness factor, the familiarity factor, there's the let's-be-a-part-of-the local economy factor, and other sound reasons.  You may be your neighbor's customer.  And if something goes wrong with the deal, Ashevillians are liable to work it out over a local beer at a local bar.

So there you go.  Ask yourself, "Is it worth it to buy local?" 

Lord willing, I'll be in Asheville Tuesday afternoon.  And, one of the best things about the place is that you're treated like a local.  That feels pretty good to a visitor from anywhere.
       

Last month, Public Relations Manager Dana McGough took an impromptu 48-hour trip to New York to see Mary-Louise Parker in Hedda Gabler.  This is her story.

The Pod Hotel met my three criteria for a preferred New York City hotel: cleanliness, easy access to a good subway line, and a location on the East Side within walking distance of Serendipity. Most New York hotel rooms are minuscule, so I decided to reward this hotelier for boldly parlaying that into an actual theme.  

Most rooms at The Pod share bathrooms at the end of the halls.  For this trip I decided to splurge on a "comfy double" room with its own shower and toilet. Laying crossways across the bed, I could touch the north and south walls of my room.  As promised on the website, the bed doubles as the couch, and luggage only fits in the room if it's shoved under the bed.  With white walls, stainless fixtures and colorful comforters, it was the perfect place to pass the 1.5 waking hours of my trip not spent out enjoying the city.  The location and price tag more than made up for the awkward moments spent waiting for the elevator in the morning beside antsy guys in boxers with toothbrushes in hand, waiting impatiently for their go at the loo.

There's also a truly fantastic hole-in-the-wall Thai place down the street called Thai 51.  That, coupled with the great speed at which my blackberry received and sent data, reminded me why so very many people live and work in that city.  

Returning to Birmingham, I spared no expense for my colleagues at DavisDenny.  I brought back the specially designed Pod shampoo bottle for my boss Tim.  He took one look and quipped, "Is this a urine sample?"

The Jane. As a friend described it on Twitter, "OMG!!!! A Wes Anderson inspired hotel in NYC!!!!!"

At a whopping 50 square feet, The Jane's rooms are "built to look like a ship's cabin."  Yeah, it's just like on the open seas -- all the way down to the iPod docking station and 23" LCD television.  It does, indeed, look like Margot Tenenbaum could stumble out of the lobby in barrettes and a fur coat.  But its $75 a night price tag is the only thing that would justify staying three creative subway transfers away from Serendipity.

Dana McGough, DavisDenny's stalwart PR manager, spent her Thanksgiving vacation in Honduras, visiting her friend Emily, who is doing missions work teaching on the rural outskirts of Tegucigalpa.

Dana's departure from the Birmingham airport was uneventful, and the flight peaceful.  Upon descent to Tegucigalpa, she felt a great slam shudder the plane from underneath as it touched down on the runway.  Dana looked up from her book in shock, and was stymied even further by thunderous applause from her fellow passengers.

Note to readers: Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, has the second-shortest runway in the world, and any pilot who lands without incident gets a well-deserved ovation from the passengers.

Dana and Emily soon made their way to the street market in town to sample the local delicacies, including a fantastic dish of papusa.  They also snacked on lychees (or rambutans, depending on your source), a small tropical fruit resembling a spiky red urchin (on the outside) and a pale, seeded eyeball (on the inside).  There were Dunkin' Donuts shops on every corner, and political billboards everywhere.

Dana had a thrill-packed ride up to Emily's mountain village in a "rapidito," one of many buses outfitted for mass transit.  These buses traverse Tegucigalpa, as well as the winding mountain roads nearby, and the drivers do not know fear.  Dana was only thrown into the aisle once, but with much more grace than Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone.  Our intrepid traveler regained her seat just in time to marvel at the boarding of a concessions seller, hawking tamales and other wares.

Emily teaches at the Academia los Pinares.  Read the recent Birmingham News article about their correspondence via the web with students of Mt. Laurel Elementary School.

After class each day, Dana sampled the wonders of Honduras, from the rainforest to the city market to the towering Big Jesus.  Her Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday was a sumptuous spread of baked vegetables, vegetarian pot pie, pumpkin rolls, pineapples, and fresh-baked bread.  

Dana remarks that she heard Big Jesus isn't as big as the one in Rio, but still.  Pretty gosh-darn impressive, and looming over a massive Coca-Cola sign.  The statue was erected in 1998, right before Hurricane Mitch ravaged Honduras; many residents felt it was divine retribution for erecting a graven image.

At ground level, Dana didn't see any snakes in Honduras, much to Ben Burford's relief/chagrin, even in the towering forest.

When asked for any advice to give those visiting Honduras, Dana doesn't hesitate: "Beware the stuffed frogs!"  At nearly every souvenir shop, she met an array of red stuffed bullfrogs, their black eyes glinting and peering en masse at wherever she stood. Dana considered buying a batch as disconcerting stocking stuffers, but couldn't bring herself to touch the things.  "I was frightened, amused, and somewhat bewildered by their popularity.  They were everywhere."

Come Tuesday afternoon, Dana was enjoying a frozen yogurt at Hobby Airport in Houston, and checking a backlog of 50 hojillion e-mails.  She had zero jet lag on Wednesday morning; for all the miles between home and Honduras, they aren't even in different time zones.

More of Dana's pictures from Honduras are available on the DavisDenny Flickr page.

When asked why anyone would want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, a skydiver's usual stock response is, "The door was open!"  The special type of crazy people who seek this out have two options: tandem jump, and accelerated freefall.  Tandem jumpers need next to no preparation, since they are strapped to the chest of an instructor the entire time.
   
Accelerated freefall, on the other hand, requires eight hours of instruction and training for a solo trip.  My recent high-speed descent was a birthday present from my dad; naturally, I chose the second, manlier option. I'm the third in my line to skydive, so I knew it was only a matter of time before I undertook this rite of passage.

After several hours of jittery memorization and mock-jumping, I met my other instructors, Sue and Jason.  They would be escorting me down, holding either side of my flight suit. Before I knew it, we were making our way to the roaring door, last in line.

I stepped to the portal, and after one last spot-check, felt my adrenaline max out as I stepped sideways into nothing.  The first few seconds after leaving the plane is spent accelerating in a pinwheeling freefall, the horizon spinning as your inner ear freaks out, desperate for some kind of grounding.  My attempts at steady breathing came out in a quavering shriek.

Incidentally, another part of AFF school is the use of hand signals, since the infernal, roaring wind of freefall drowns out all speech.

They also keep you busy as possible, mostly to keep your head in the game while the altimeter winds down.  Traveling at 243 feet per second is not the time to get distracted.  The photographer drifted across in front of me a moment later, and I lost my train of thought with the realization that "OH MY GOD I'M FALLING FROM THE SKY!!"



I pulled my pilot chute seconds later; my main chute billowed, my feet flew upward, and I felt hung suspended in the tranquil stillness just below cloud level. 

This was cut short by a terrifying moment of not seeing ANY airfield or parachutes below; it's disorienting to be utterly lost even when you have a bird's eye view.  I smacked my firehead bitterly, yelling, "Why does this always happen, anytime I go ANYWHERE, I always get lost, stupid, stupid!"  Then I remembered to steer the parachute, turned around, and found the airstrip for a rough landing minutes later.

Skydiving seriously turns the volume down on one's day-to-day worries and fears; I highly recommend it.  On the drive home, as I rolled down the windows and watched the speedometer creep up, I thought, "Why, this isn't fast at all!"

Ben Burford stepped up to the center stage at Bryant Denny stadium this fall, thanks to his darling wife Jean.  After she placed a winning auction bid at the Arty Party, the College of Arts & Science's annual fundraising shindig, he got a turn directing the University of Alabama's Million Dollar Band at a home football game.  It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the 1974 Alabama graduate and lifetime Tide fan.

Upon finding out, Ben first rose from his dramatic swoon, then sagely chose the game against Western Kentucky, a team Bama was heavily favored over, to overcome any possible Burford jinx or hijinks.  "I would hate to do an important game and have us lose," Burford remarks.

The day of the game, Ben had a tooth-rattling cup of strong black coffee for breakfast.  He donned his crimson collared shirt with palm trees (Chillwear), khaki shorts (REI), and University of Alabama Crocs (Bama Fever).  He lastly donned a treasured relic, the Crimson Tide bow tie formerly borne by Tuscaloosa "colorful personality" Shorty Price.

When the time came for the National Anthem, Ben was directed to a tall ladder, prominent before the band and assembled thousands.  A nameless assistant asked him, "Mr. Burford, are you gonna be okay on that ladder?"  Ben, the experienced front man for decades-spanning cover band Chevy 6, waved the fretting youngster off and got his groove on.

"What struck me the most was, I'd never realized just what a fantastic organization the Million Dollar Band was, how dedicated, attentive, and courteous they all are.  They all work their butts off."

Ben and Jean spent the rest of the game tearing it up in the student section with their son, Frank, watching the Tide roll to a 41-7 victory over the Hilltoppers.

Ben Burford is a partner at DavisDenny. For more of his exciting and colorful adventures, be sure to read Ben's Brazil Bacation.