Birmingham - The Wife's Perspective

This post is definitely waaaaaay after-the-fact, but I’ll keep it brief. I feel like I’m on a role after the last post. Not enough of a role to go back very far in time, but I can go back this far.

Alabama. Birmingham. We got grandma and grandpa to watch the little person for a long weekend and flew in. The trip was also a “babymoon” given that our second little person was due to join us not two months later. We stayed at the Westin, and the staff there might have been the friendliest we have ever encountered. Which is a good thing, because we spent a lot of time with them. A lot.

The Mercedes Benz Marathon is one of the more condensed, easy viewing, and smoother running events of a large size that we’ve participated in, and for that alone I want to recommend making the trip, but Birmingham. Oh Birmingham, how you disappointed me.

The problem? There was absolutely nowhere to go, at least without a car (which we didn’t have, thinking that by staying in the downtown of a big city we’d be within walking distance to most everything anyway. Wrong). We even went to the expo TWICE just to kill more time. We ended up venturing out a couple of times, but both times involved walks of approximately 2 miles through desolate neighborhoods. And keep in mind that I was also quite hugely pregnant.  It wasn’t too bad when we went out the first time during the day, but when we headed back out for dinner one night I let Mike know in no uncertain terms that we’d have to take a cab back. Which might have been fine, except a storm hit and the cab that we were told would take 10 minutes took over an hour and five phone calls to get to us. So after that we mostly ate at the hotel. Luckily for us Todd English’s PUB is a great restaurant. They were also in the process of building all kinds of new restaurants and other venues right in the Westin corridor so maybe for future races it will be much more of a destination, but if you go I’d definitely recommend you make sure to have a car.