Enjoy history, music and rocket science in America’s Deep South
EMMA BONNER beams with pride as she watches her baby granddaughter play.
The 71-year-old sits elegantly in her Sunday best, the very picture of a doting gran.
But dismiss her at your peril — because Emma helped change the world.
In May 1963, she marched through Birmingham, Alabama, with Martin Luther King to fight for black rights in America’s Deep South.
Then just 15, Emma was menaced by police dogs and blasted with water cannon so strong they could strip bark from trees — their jets slamming teenagers over car roofs and down the city streets.
She spent her 16th birthday under arrest and locked in a barn usually reserved for cattle.
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Its session musicians, the Swampers, set up a rival studio a few blocks away in 1969 and you can tour both by appointment.
Here, your hair will stand up on end. Neither site has changed a lick (you can still see the Rolling Stones’ fag burns on the couch) and the access given to fans is extraordinary.
Forget queuing for hours for a whistlestop dash of Graceland.
Here you can play the piano where Paul Simon recorded Kodachrome or sit in the loo where Keith Richards finished Wild Horses.
The Muscle Shoals Sound Studio is a tiny box of a building once used to store coffins, yet Rod Stewart, Bob Seger and Cher have all piled in to record.
Grown men have been known to cry on the spot where the Stones laid down Brown Sugar.
If you can tear yourself away, head to Champy’s for some sinful buttermilk-fried chicken, fried green tomatoes and hot tamales.
Or dine in the 360 Grille at the Marriott Shoals, a revolving restaurant with breathtaking views of the Tennessee River.
Less than 150 miles away, the Little River has its own impressive show at the gorgeous DeSoto Falls.
Alabama’s biggest state park has 3,000 acres of forests, rivers and canyons and makes a great stop-off for a weekend of hiking and camping.
While you are there, grab a bargain at Unclaimed Baggage.
This legendary secondhand store sells lost luggage (airlines wait 90 days to sell cases to them) for next to nowt.
You can pick up a MacBook for £100 and designer handbags for a fraction of that.
The only rule is No Pets Allowed, a disappointment to the man ejected in front of us for the live parrot on his shoulder.
We then travelled to Huntsville, staying at the Marriott SpringHill Suites.
It was at the US Space & Rocket Center that Nasa scientists developed the rockets that put Americans on the moon.
We gawped at a vast Apollo Saturn V rocket and a priceless fragment of moon rock.
There was just time for a ride in a brain-melting G4 simulator before heading back down to Earth — a welcome return to Sweet Home Alabama.