Just TOR and me for our road trip to Noccalula Falls, but we hope Ginny will join us again soon. We drove through familiar territory along Highway 280 to Childersburg, where we were supposed to pick up Highway 76 to get to Highway 77. However, we ran into a case of “You can’t get there from here,” thanks to one of ALDOT’s road projects, but a couple U turns took us around the construction “elbow” and then up through Winterboro (home of Plank Road Station, which we visited on the Cheaha trip) to the Talladega area where we eased onto Highway 77 with no trouble.
Much of the drive north on Highway 77 followed the meanderings of H. Neely Henry Lake, the first of a series of lakes formed by the Alabama Power Company in the 1950s and 1960s. (Other lakes formed this way include Weiss, Logan Martin, and Lay Lake.) H. Neely Henry Lake and H. Neely Henry Dam on the Coosa River, completed in June 1966, are named for a senior executive with Alabama Power, but none of the sources I checked explained what the H. stood for—probably not Henry. It was a beautiful day, and lots of folks were out boating on the sunny waters.
H. Neely Henry Lake and Dam 
In Birmingham, the historic Southside neighborhood is an area within the city—home to Five Points South, Highland Avenue, and UAB, among other things. Up near Gadsden, Southside is a separate city incorporated in 1957 to bring together several small rural farming communities, including Green Valley, Cedar Bend, and Pilgrims Rest, all established in the 1850s.
ROAD TRIPS! 