[QUOTE=Zeldar]
Of the places you mention, what’s your favorite and why?
Before you answer, let me say that the Huntsville/Guntersville/Scottsboro area has to be the best kept secret Alabama has to offer. That and Gulf Shores.
I spent a summer boarding in B’ham while working a cushy job for the Highway Department between school years. An aunt lived in Ensley and we visited her a lot. So I know a bit about the Big City.
What part of Montgomery?
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Yeah, I’d agree with you about that stretch of north Alabama. I was lucky enough to be working for the National Park Service when I lived up there, doing all kinds of species inventories and ecological monitoring. I was stationed at Russell Cave National Monument (way up in the corner of Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia), and wow. The whole Cumberland Plateau area is just spectacularly gorgeous. It’s definitely (apart from some of the towns up there, which I could take or leave) been my favorite place to live in Alabama. When I first moved there, I moved in with my girlfriend, who was living in Huntsville, and I had to commute 75 miles each way to Russell Cave. It was a hell of a commute, but that drive along US72, with the Tennessee River, and all the highlands of the Cumberland around me made it a pleasure.
After a while, we moved out to Scottsboro to cut down on the drive, and that made it even better.
I really like Birmingham as well, though. I’m in a PhD program right now, which is going well, am married (to that same woman), and we bought a house in Roebuck Springs, which is a gorgeous historic district. I’ve mentioned this before, but Mary Badham, the actress who played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, had relatives who owned this house, so she used to play here all the time. 
I grew up in a little suburb section of Montgomery that doesn’t even have a name, I don’t think. It’s way down on the southeastern edge of the city, and is now rapidly becoming a place you don’t want to be after the sun sets.