Auburn is a rather quiet southern university town, home of
Alabama’s land grant university, now named after the town . Auburn is a quite
large school in terms of enrollment with some pleasant architecture around
several quads. The town, though, seems quite dull for one with such a large
university. The commercial center of Auburn extends about one block in each
direction from the crossroads at the northeast corner of university and is not
what I’d consider a rockin’ fun college town like Charlottesville, Chapel Hill,
Athens, GA, or Lawrence, KS. Where states have both a major university and a
major land grant university (Kansas, Iowa, Colorado, Montana, Washington, Utah)
the land grant school tends to be the more conservative of the two. But
Auburn’s so conservative as far as big public schools go that James Dobson of
Focus on Family has recommended it as one large public university that’s OK for
fundamentalist Christians to consider. Boring!

I would have no reason to stop in Auburn if I didn’t know
someone in town. My cousin Yvette lives in Auburn where her husband Jeff is a
professor of ichthyology/aquaculture (think of catfish farming) . I spent two
night with them and their kids Caleb and Sarah after not seeing her in more
than 20 years husband Jeff, and kids Caleb and Sarah. In between my evenings
with them I spent a relaxing day bumming WiFi at a coffee shop and checking out
the campus and town.

Alabama is the deepest heartland of America’s college
football mania, and the biggest rivalry is not with a school in another state
but an in-state family feud with the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. I
left town on Thursday morning, Yvette and Jeff warning me that with a home
football game on Saturday Auburn would start getting gridlocked with RVs by the
afternoon. A home football game in Alabama is something I can live without
experiencing.

Between Auburn & Montgomery is the town of Tuskegee,
famous for the Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington during the
post-Civil War era as a college for freed slaves. Parts of the Tuskegee
Institute, including the building where George Washington Carver conducted his
many experiments on uses for crops like soybeans and peanuts are now part of a
National Historic Site . During WWII, a time when the U.S. armed forces were
still racially segregated, a training center was established outside Tuskegee
to prepare black soldiers to be pilots, a site that is now Tuskegee Airmen
National Historic Site. Although there is a gigantic parking lot at the Tuskegee
Airmen site and two hangars of displays on the Tuskegee airmen, I was the only
visitor; ditto for the museum at Tuskegee Institute. Well, two more checks off
the list of NPS units.