Gulf Shores, Alabama

14th Mar – 18th Mar 2022

Alabama is our only previously unvisited state of this trip. We had not taken Big Dave and Tin Can to California or Florida before, but we have holidayed in these states in previous years. So, exciting times! Unfortunately our Alabama stay was going to be limited to its short coast, which we knew was not going to give us a typical Alabaman experience. The state is fairly rectangular and nearly land-locked save for a small forked tongue of territory that juts south between Mississippi and the Florida panhandle to reach the coast. This gives it a shipping port, Mobile, the large protected Mobile Bay and a small slice of quite beautiful gulf coast with white sandy beaches and gulf barrier islands. Our selected stop was a place called Gulf Shores and given the timing of our visit we were going to see it at its zenith, Spring Break.

Spring Break is a quintesentially American phenomenon. It is a week-long holiday from school or college that happens on various weeks in March and which has eveolved into a mass exodus of holiday makers from the cooler Northern states to the warmer climes of the Southern beaches. Often this involves car journeys of epic proportions of which ‘ Peking-to-Paris Rally’ competitors would be proud. Some places have become hot-spots for the mass gathering of swimwear-clad, hormone-ravaged, partying college students and thus has become an important calendar date in the academic year. Gulf Shores is one of those hotspots. Spending time here was like going on safari. We wanted to see this spectacle of the great migration for ourselves. *

*Longterm friends, family and any passing aquaintances of my husband may possibly be aware that he spent his gap year on a scholarship exchange to a US private school in Massachusetts. During that time he too, with a friend called Bruce, made the unfathomable automobile pilgramage to the southern shores during a Spring Break week. You may have even heard the tales of driving endurance, brushes with the law, illegal camping, washing at beach showers, gluttony at all-you-can-eat-buffets, schemes to get into nightclubs with fake IDs and of course the alchohol that washed it all down. Even though his destination had been Daytona Beach in Florida, not Gulf Shores in Alabama, it meant that there was a large degree of nostalgia to this part of our journey.

We arrived into Gulf Shores very,very slowly. The traffic was heavy and it seemed that we had been caught in the (sedate) stampede to the sun. The town is a temple to vacations and has a huge number of hotels, holiday apartments, restaurants and bars. It also has the Gulf Shores State Park with a 600 space campsite. This would have been our preferred location to stay but was fully booked until kingdom come. In fact we were very lucky to find any space at all and we had happily secured four nights at a private RV park a couple of miles from the town and beach. We stopped for provisions at Walmart and spotted multiple small herds of the newly arrived party pilgrims doing the same. They were easily identifiable in their small single-sex groups of four or five individuals (a car-load), dressed in beachwear despite it being a little too cool for it and pale-skinned having come from the wintery nothern climes. The groups of girls were busily filling trollies with a variety of foodstuffs, the groups of boys seemed to have no idea what they were doing.

We had three full days here. Unfortunately we lost one day to crappy weather and another to me having an attack of vertigo. The fact that the two things didn’t happen on the same day is quite unfair. Anyway, our last full day here was beautiful and we broke out the bikes to do three days worth of exploring in one day. This also happened to be St Patricks Day. Wearing nothing green, unlike the majority of everyone else out and about that day, we set off. Our campsite was linked to town by a splendid cycle route which carried on to the state park. We cruised around the beautiful park on miles and miles of lovely paved trails and it was great to see so many people out of their cars doing the same thing. There were even communal bikes at various stations around the park that you could just borrow for free. Our rollings took us on a very circuitous route down to the beach where most of the seafront is given over to the concrete sprawl of hotels and condos. The beach itself is quite splendid and I can completely understand why this place became a popular holiday destination to those that live in the chilly North.

Once on the beach we started to see the first signs of drunken merriment, and it wasn’t amongst the youthful Spring Breakers, oh no. There was a very large contingent of ‘Irish-for-a day’, green-clad, silly headgear-wearing gangs of middle aged people – mainly women – who were already wasted and staggering around at 3pm. We sat outside a bar which was subtley decorated in a pink hue (!) and had a couple of re-hydratory cans of beer whilst watching the spectacle of some ‘sober’ ladies trying to pick up their ‘less sober’ friends from the floor. There was much shrieking and giggling and it was quite an amusing show. By now it was reasonably hot and there were quite a few people sunning themselves on the beach but almost no-one in the water. We strolled down to the shore with our beers in hand to check out the sea temperature and discovered why – it was still brass monkeys. Thankfully the beach patrol police officer that we casually sauntered past didn’t clock that we were (quite innocently) violating the NO ALCOHOL ON THE BEACH law, so we escaped getting into trouble. A travel adventure that we could live without.

We continued our prommenade down the beach and soon discovered where all the young folk were hanging out, and it didn’t involve any alcohol. It transpired that Gulf Shores was hosting the Intercollegiate Womens’ Beach Volleyball tournament, and guess where all the boys were?? Very sporting of them to support the (bikini clad) female athletes…. Nick resisted taking any photos. It was for the best.

After a while we decided that we had seen enough of the outside world and headed back to base before the real madness of St Patrick’s Day kicked off. That was also for the best. We had clocked up a respectable 20 miles in the saddle.

On the morning of our leaving day I woke up feeling rotten again. There was a very dicey weather forecast for lots of rain, damaging hail, high winds and a possibility of tornadoes. Our gut reaction was to stay put and see if we could get another night where we were. Better to be stationary in both a storm and an attack of vertigo. This was not an option however. No room at the inn. So we hastily packed up and set off. The weather was on its way and headed in the same direction as we were for about 100 miles until our paths were going to diverge -according to the forecasts. We were about an hour ahead of the front so as long as we kept moving we hopefully would escape the worst of it. We had the radio on and the programs were intermittantly interupted by a frantic sounding warning sirens followed by storm warning alerts. It was a bit unnerving. Very happily, though, we arrived at our next destination without even seeing a speck of rain. We were now in Florida, in the Eastern time zone and my dizziness, for now, had gone. Our next camp was a rough diamond in a gorgeous location. Indian Pass.