Coastal Alabama

 Blog Thur 6th - Fri 7th April 2023

Coastal Alabama

We have spent the past two nights at an AirBNB in Grand Bay in the southwest corner of Alabama. It’s not that we wanted a break from camping, but rather that we needed to break up the journey as we head west and had read that the nearby town of Bayou La Batre was worth visiting and . There don’t appear to be many attractive campgrounds in this area so we decided to book a cottage through AirBNB. It has been a good opportunity to re-organize our gear and plan the next stages of our trip, and we have enjoyed visiting the area.

Yesterday we had a splendid day driving out the Dauphin Island, which is approached by a long causeway and spectacular bridge. It was a beautiful, hot and sunny day and we enjoyed looking for birds and paddling in the ocean. We returned via Bayou La Batre, which appears to have a large and active fishing fleet (shrimpers). I think this may be the place where the scenes from Forrest Gump were filmed, when is off working on a shrimp boat. We tried to buy some shrimp, but the minimum size was 5 lb pack and we really don’t have the means to store what we wouldn’t eat that night, so we had to pass. We got back to the cottage in the late afternoon and spent the rest of the evening trying to rationalize our gear storage and plan the next stages of our journey.

One of the biggest differences on this trip relative to 1987 is how busy the National and State Park campgrounds are. When we made our previous tour we didn’t book anything in advance and had no problems securing a campsite when we arrived at any park. In planning this vacation we made a rough itinerary but hoped to stay flexible and take things as they came. I have a tendency to over plan  and wanted to be more spontaneous. In retrospect, this was a mistake and we should have decided on our key locations and booked them months in advance, as soon as the on-line booking systems would allow us. It is now spring, whereas it was autumn last time, but my suspicion is that the parks are simply a lot busier than they were 35 years ago. Over the past ten days it has become evident that can’t just turn up and expect there to be space. In many cases we are already too late to book some of our target destinations. For example, we were unable to book a site in the Chicos campsite up in the mountains of Big Bend National Park, but were able to book in at the Cottonwoods campground down by the Rio Grande on the west side of the park. For Arches National Park there doesn’t appear to be an open campsite within fifty miles on the dates that we plan to visit, which is still a month away, so we have booked a “site” to camp in someone’s backyard in Moab through AirBNB! Even towards the end of our trip, two months in advance, we can’t get a site in Theodore National Park so we are going to stay in the State Park nearby.  As you may have gathered, I spent much of the evening time at our AirBNB trying to match up our desired schedule with availability, figuring out options, and essentially locking down campsite and the occasional AirBNB for the remainder of our trip. I think we are mostly in good shape but it’s been quite a production. So much for spontaneity!

Mike

Boardwalk at the Grand Bay Wildlife Management Area. 

The Gulf of Mexico beach at Dauphin Island. There was also an equally lovely, but calm bayside beach 

Al the houses on Dauphin Island were built on stilts. Considering the land is barely above sea level and this area is vulnerable to hurricanes, it's not surprising.

One of the less attractive features of our AIrBNB cottage was that it was 100 feet from this railroad track, and trains would come rumbling through with great regularity!