Alabama - Day 29 - east of Mobile Bay

Riverside RV Resort, Robertsdale
Sunday, 29 December 2019

Because my next campground was less than a couple of hours away from last night's, I decided to take this chance to see something of Alabama's coastline.

When I was walking the dogs right before we left the campground, a car stopped and the woman driving turned out to be my savior from 2 nights ago, the very nice person who had helped me after I got dragged through the gravel.  Her name is Selena, and she stopped on her way to work to ask how I was doing.  Very nice woman.

today's route

Alabama actually has 2 chunks of land on the Gulf of Mexico, one on either side of Mobile Bay, which the city of Mobile sits at the head of.  I wasn't sure how long it'd take me to drive on these roads so planned to see only half of this eastern side.

The drive
I went past the town of Satsuma - "Safest City in Alabama" - which is where the dog-grabbing officials came from yesterday.  They have a Whataburger there, making me realize once again I'm not far from Texas.

I'd chosen a route that would avoid the tunnels that connect Mobile to the east side of the Bay, but as I was driving along I could see a very high bridge up ahead and gradually realized my route took me over this bridge.  Not liking bridges any better than tunnels, I pulled over to consult the map.

While I was looking at the map in the parking lot of an abandoned business, I saw a sign that said, "Future Home of the Legacy Lane Remembrance of the Individuals on the Clotilda."  I understood not one word of that and looked it up.  And was stunned.  I knew I had passed a sign for the turnoff to Africatown USA and assumed it was a game park or amusement park.  It's not.  It's the name of a community formed by those who were brought on the last slave ship from Africa, arriving on the ship Clotilda in Mobile in 1860.  This link tells their remarkable story, and explains the sign's plan to remember them.   https://en.wikipedia.org/Africatown

So, back to the bridge.  Yes, I had to go over it.  The alternative, beside Mobile's tunnels, was to go all the way back up to the interstate and drive all the way around the various water bodies to find a way south again.  So I gritted my teeth and over we went.

Cochrane-Africatown USA bridge

This thing is more than a mile long and actually goes over as much water as it does the land in this photo.  You may remember during Hurricane Katrina an oil platform broke loose and was swept under a bridge.  This is the bridge.  But it was built in a special way to withstand the rigors of the salt water environment, so the bridge continued to be usable even with the oil platform.  This is the route the DMV sends trucks with hazardous cargo, so I figured if they could use it, so could I.

I used my previous education and took the inside lane and went the speed I was comfortable with and let other drivers take care of themselves because, after all, there was another lane.  It worked fine.

On the other side we passed the Battleship Alabama, and I wanted to stop but couldn't figure out where the entrance was.  If I'd realized it was on my route, I'd have looked it up ahead of time.  This ship served during WWII in the Pacific Theater, was decommissioned in 1947, and was almost sold for scrap before Mobile businesses pitched in to buy it for a museum.

The road led into the town of Spanish Fort: A City of Spirit, they say, followed by Daphne: Jubilee City (they're jubilant about an annual freak of nature that brings lots of crab, shrimp and so forth close enough to shore to be caught easily).

These towns plus nearby Fairhope all have large attractive houses and yards, and ivy-covered trunks of old trees along the roads.  At least, that's what I saw along the roads I took.  I'm sure they've got housing for normal folks as well, though.  They're on a designated Alabama Scenic Byway, which I took along the eastern side of Mobile Bay.

It was in one of these towns that I saw this odd historical marker about Andrew Jackson.

I'm willing to forgive the grammatical error because of the humor.

Along this road I passed, though couldn't read, a historical marker labeled "Ecor Rouge."  I've tried, almost completely unsuccessfully, to learn more about Ecor Rouge and got only as far as the fact that it means "red cliff" which describes the landmark used by mariners back to the Spanish and French explorers and, doubtless, by the Natives before them.  But I found this charming report that describes the area, which was broadcast on NPR a few years ago, and the transcript is at this link.   https://www.npr.org/a-few-miles-from-mobile

This Scenic Byway becomes a typical drive along a waterfront - many residences focused on the water, with driveways running down to the houses, which all have cute little names: Where the Sidewalk Ends; Kate's Place; Tabby Corner; Nest of Nine; Thanks Doc; Happy Ours.  These residences mostly have big porches but the architecture is varied.   I saw one that was hexagonal - seriously, the walls sloped sharply to form six sides.  It was connected by a breezeway to a smaller version of itself.  It had screened porches and looked very inviting.

Point Clear has a large waterfront park and half the dogs in town were out being walked.  Wish I could do that with my dogs.  Point Clear also is the home of the Grand Hotel, which was set back too far from the road for me to see clearly, though I'm betting it doesn't look like Mackinac Island's Grand Hotel.  There's also a yacht marina next door - I know because there were several yachts moored there.

I passed small beach houses and large beach houses and large grand houses that made no concessions for being on a beach (why do people want fancy expensive houses like that in this setting?).

I passed a sign advertising Lambert's Cafe - Home of Throwed Rolls.  Of course, I had to look this up and learned that about 40 years they were so crowded one noon that the cook couldn't get the hot rolls to the tables and one customer said to just throw them.  So now they do that all the time.  They've been sued for injuries involving these "throwed rolls," and I can't imagine why they don't just post a sign saying people eat there at their own risk and refuse to pay damages, but apparently they do pay them.  Weird.

We stopped to rest at the Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, which was closed on a Sunday, though locals were coming here to hike on their trails, so we walked around a little, too.  In their visitor center area, I saw a Louisiana Sweet Orange Tree, that they harvest every year about this time, and an oak-leaf hydrangea, and old live oaks, and a sweet-smelling pine grove.  Also some short tree (or very tall bush - about 6' tall) that had monster leaves: there were dried leaves on the ground that were twice the size of my foot (and I have big feet).

Down the road I passed the turnoff for the Weeks Bay Pitcher Plant Bog, which may be fascinating though a little creepy, but we didn't go.

At some point that I couldn't identify, after one of the road's turns I started seeing signs naming this road as part of the Alabama Coastal Connection.  When I looked up the route later, it seems I was on this coastal connection for most of the day.

As I got closer to the Gulf, I started feeling strong crosswinds when I was traveling east or west.

But this is still agricultural country: I saw one of those Share The Road signs that usually mean share with bicycles, but this time they'd added the picture of a tractor that they wanted us to share with.

I came into Gulf Shores: Small Town, Big Beach.  I passed a sign at a vet clinic that read: "Neuter your dog - it will make him less nuts."

As far as I could tell, in both Gulf Shores and neighboring Orange Beach the only tall buildings are condos and hotels on the beach.

I turned on the long road that leads along the narrow strip of land that runs out to divide Mobile Bay from the Gulf of Mexico, and that ends at Fort Morgan.  All along this road I found mostly pastel-painted elevated beach houses on either side of the road (facing the Bay or the Gulf).  I passed several signs warning we were in a time of high risk of rip currents in the water.

I passed Gregorys Lane.  The local fire department had a sign out front saying all they want for Christmas is "numbers on your mail box."  I remember in Austin the emergency services folks were often pushing for people to put clearly visible and legible numbers on their houses, and I don't know why people don't.  Such an easy and obvious safety measure.  Guess folks think they'll never have a fire or need an ambulance.

I met a CruiseAmerica RV on the road, and remembered when I'd rented one, and thought about what a great experience these folks must be having with theirs.

I'd hoped that when I got out to Fort Morgan, or somewhere along the way, there'd be someplace the dogs and I could stop and stretch our legs and have some lunch, but it turned out I could have these things only if I wanted to pay for them.  Fort Morgan is now a national historic site and they charge an admission fee, which I didn't want to pay because I didn't want to tour the fort buildings  (it was a Civil War site).  It's right next door to a ferry terminal, where the ferries that go across the Bay to Mobile come in.  But they too charge to park there if you're not waiting in line for a ferry, so I turned around and went back along the road.

I hoped I could turn into one of those areas with the beach houses and find a place to park near the beach.  Boy was I wrong.  I tried several places and in all of them I ended up at dead ends so small I could barely get turned around to get out of there.  Meanwhile my own bladder was becoming more insistent, and finding a place to stop became as important as it was impossible to find.  I finally saw a small recycle area in front of a fire station and pulled in there.  I knew folks came to drop their recycling because someone did while we were there.  I walked the dogs around a little bit though didn't want to go out of sight of the RV, given we were partly blocking the fire station entrance.  But we stayed there for a little while and had some lunch and nobody complained.  The moral of that story is: don't go out to Ft. Morgan unless you want to visit Ft. Morgan.  Or take the ferry.

I headed back north on a road called the Foley Express, probably because it's a good divided road that runs through the town of Foley.  But first there's a toll bridge, which I knew nothing about until it loomed in front of me.  It was built like those ghastly fads among highway designers called flyovers, that rise up high in the air and make a nearly 90° turn before coming down somewhat abruptly.  It was a one-lane road and it's sheer luck there wasn't any crosswind and there weren't people behind me.  It'd've been ugly if there had.

And then the road came down smack to a toll booth, where they wanted me to pay $2.75 for that privilege.  As I explained to the woman at the toll booth, I feel like they should be paying me the $2.75 for having forced me to cross that bridge.  She agreed and was the one who told me how bad it gets when there's crosswinds.

Driving north I started seeing Hurricane Evacuation Route signs.

My campground for the next 3 nights is on the River Styx, that in Greek mythology forms the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead.  Should have realized it was an omen for me.  Driving along the road to get there, we passed the very active Styx River Shooting Range.  Startled both the dogs, and I didn't like it much either.

The campground seemed very pleasant, clean, comfortable, though small, but we settled in for a few days.