High-Fiving the hometown : Birmingham, Alabama

It’s January. The month where you sign all your checks with the wrong year until your brain catches up. A month of wet rain and resolutions. A month sponsored by flight delays and stale crackers because someone forgot how to operate a chip clip.

My resolutions for 2016 are plump. Go to India. Finish my novel. Drink less caffeine. Find a damn chip clip.

However, my favorite resolution this year is more cerebral than concrete. I plan to try harder in seeking small moments of travel in unexpected places. I want to celebrate the everyday offerings more. To find something new to love about destinations that feel limp and exhausted. To wander around. To pull out my camera for things I previously took for granted.

I started by including my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in my latest story for Travel Channel, entitled The Next 11 Great Travel Destinations. The response was rapid. Those in the hospitality business took to the Internet to leverage the press, citing the city as the only U.S. location chosen by Travel Channel. In truth, I chose all the destinations. I wanted to shine a little light into dark corners. I wanted to keep my resolution to look at travel differently this year. And, let’s face it … not everyone is running off to Sardinia, The Republic of Georgia and Uganda for the weekend.

Then Facebook went slightly bananas, with people calling me a hack who had no idea what she was talking about. “Birmingham is boring,” they screamed. Even though I’d listed about 10 cool things to check out, mentioned our six James Beard nominations and our new Lyric Theater. The fact that we have the oldest baseball park in America (and the newest) and four craft breweries.

Had I listed Birmingham as the “Most Boring Place to Travel,” however, you can bet those same people would want my head on a meat skewer. Publicly tarred and feathered in Jim & Nick’s BBQ sauce, no doubt.

That’s the life of a writer. You’ll never make everyone happy.

I’ve begun my resolutions. I didn’t list my hometown without holding my own feet to the fire. My friend Richard Brendel and I took our cameras out on a balmy December morning (what’s up with 2016 weather?) to capture Birmingham.

We drove to Sloss Furnaces (another place that should be on any visitor’s list) and laid across train tracks. We picked up rusted railroad spikes for investigation, jammed our lenses through chainlink fences and strolled the cobblestones of Morris Avenue at sunset. We saw a sign that said “Happy Birthday Jesus,” and two hitchhikers, possibly bound for a less boring town. We had a lovely day exploring the place we both grew up and left for less boring towns.

Here’s to you, Hometown of mine. Yes, you have been boring in the past, but I think you’re trying hard to sparkle. Even if it’s just rare beauty in rust on a train track, I wanted to salute that.