Saturday, December 06, 2008 - Tuscaloosa AL
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My overnight neighbors - Team Trails, Dec 06, 2008
What's wrong with this picture?
The Team Trails website indicates the bass tournament blast off is at "safe light" this morning. It's now long past safe light and their rig is still here. What am I missing?
Night Camp
Wal-Mart Parking Lot in Tuscaloosa AL
Wal-Mart Supercenter in Tuscaloosa AL
Wal-Mart Supercenter Store #715, 1501 Skyland Blvd E, Tuscaloosa, AL 35405 - (205) 750-0823
This Wal-Mart is one of my favorite parking lots for overnight dry camping. There is good, level parking and access to lots of shopping and services useful to the traveler.
- Good level parking, reasonably quiet
- Books-a-Million & Michaels Craft store across the road
- U-Haul propane nearby, Lowe's and Home Depot 1 mile
- Major shopping centers nearby
- Verizon cell phone service is excellent
- Verizon EVDO Broadband service is excellent
- Find other Wal-Marts in the area
- Check the weather here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.