Last year, my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary sitting at home due to COVID-19 restrictions. We had hoped to go to California, but that didn't pan out. Since we generally go somewhere during our anniversary, it was sort of up in the air this year due to some work obligations on my part that weren't cleared up until the 11th hour. My wife was wanting to go somewhere to put her toes in the sand and enjoy the ocean. She had suggested at some point about heading to the Gulf Coast of Alabama - particularly the Orange Beach/Gulf Shores area of Alabama. It was literally a last minute planning/reservations/packing session as we took off in rainy Iowa weather for what we hoped would be a few days of sun, sand and surf in southern Alabama.
What it ended up being was, well, something else. It was one of the worst vacations we had ever experienced in all our years together.
First of all, we drove. But it really wasn't that bad of a drive. My wife got a "new" used car a couple weeks prior to our vacation and was willing to put some miles on it. The weather between Iowa and Nashville - our stop for the evening - was rainy, cool and gray most of the way. Driving in rain is much more taxing than driving in sunny and clear conditions.
We got up early and took off for the final leg of our journey to the Gulf around 8 a.m. We had hoped to be there by 3 p.m. knowing that we'd have to stop for gas and bathroom breaks along the way. The weather had broken and by the time we had made it to Montgomery - about 4 hours south of Nashville - the weather was warm with big white puffy clouds. The sun was coming in and out of the clouds, it was a bit breezy and the temperature was around 85 degrees.
By the time we got to the Gulf Coast, it was cloudy, spitting rain, temperatures in the upper 60's and a stiff breeze out of the east. There was a red flag warning in effect that day which meant that only strong swimmers should be out in the ocean. However, the stiff winds - during the day they were sustained at 25 to 30 miles an hour during our time along the Gulf Coast - necessitated a double red flag warning later that day which closed the ocean to swimmers. Small craft advisories were issued and riptide undertows were prevalent up and down the coast. The above picture is the view out of hotel room right when we first got into the room.
Speaking of the hotel, we stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn in Orange Beach, AL. Since I haven't been traveling for work, my Hilton Honors points have dwindled significantly through using points on trips my wife and I took during the past year. I used a combination of points and money for the rooms on our trip. It wasn't as nice as being able to book a room 100% via points, but it was still not that bad in the long run. I had booked a room with a king bed with a sliver of a view of the white sand beach and ocean.
When we got to the hotel, we were greeted by an amiable front desk clerk by the name of Douglas. I asked if there were any upgrades available for Hilton Lifetime Diamond members, like myself. He looked in his computer and said, "Well, I can put you in a room with two queen beds." I looked at my wife and she shrugged her shoulders and thought that would be OK. The extra bed gives us a chance to lay out our bags on the unused bed. Douglas gave us a top floor (6th floor) room with the view of the beach and ocean that you see above.
The problem was, it was so windy coming off the water while we were there we couldn't really sit on the deck and enjoy the view. Even keeping the sliding glass door open to hear the waves at night wasn't as enjoyable with the wind blowing as hard as it was - even during the first couple of nights we were there.
OK, OK - yes, we sort of knew what the weather would be before we got there. We knew it would be breezy, but we were talking with some locals while we were there who said that while it can be breezy from time to time, this breeze was much more strong than normal. We were on the fringe of a storm system to the west that was dumping rain on Louisiana (we had discussed going to New Orleans for our anniversary - we're glad we didn't) and bands of showers would flow on from the ocean, rain for 15 minutes, then stop. But it was that damned wind that kept blowing.
After getting checked in and acclimated to the hotel, we decided to go out, look around at some of the sights, get the lay of the land, and find some place to eat some oysters on the half-shell. We drove to the east and headed toward the Florida-Alabama border. It was right inside the Florida border that I saw a place that I'd heard about before and was intrigued to check out - a roadside bar/restaurant/package liquor store by the name of Flora-Bama.
Flora-Bama has been around since 1964 and was purposely built on the Florida side of the Alabama border as Baldwin County, AL was a dry county at the time, while Escambia County, FL was not. As more people came to Perdido Key via a new highway that connected Gulf Shores, AL with Pensacola, FL, Flora-Bama flourished, adding on to the building and eventually building a package liquor store across the street, as well as a restaurant on the north side of Perdido Key with a parking lot that strandles the Alabama/Florida border.
Flora-Bama is famous for having live music 365 days a year and hosts a number of beach concerts, beach rodeos, and their annual Mullet Toss beach party. Flora-Bama is also one of many venues along the Florida/Alabama coast that hosts the annual Frank Brown Songwriters' Festival that showcases over 200 singer/songwriters.
We actually parked in Alabama and walked into Florida across the parking lot. Once inside, we were immediately in a gift shop full of t-shirts, hats, mugs, glasses, bottle openers, shot glasses, cookbooks, and various other overpriced items. And, of course, the shop was packed. The place reeked "tourist trap".
As we walked through the place, we heard live music in two different areas. I thought about getting a beer while we looked around, but the lines at the bars to get drinks were 8 to 12 people deep. And this was on a Tuesday. In May. With crappy weather outside. I can almost imagine how packed and crazy this place would be on a nice weekend day. But by that time, I'd had enough. I wanted to get out of there faster than I came in.
We had been reading up on some of the area attractions and the Wilbourne Antique Rose Trail in Foley, AL - about 8 miles north of Gulf Shores - caught our attention. We grow roses at our home and we're always up for a walk through a rose garden to get ideas for what we may want to add to our 2 dozen rose bushes that we have around our yard. The description of the Wilbourne Antique Rose Trail said it was a mile-long path through the city that had "5,000 fragrant and hardy roses". This we had to see.
Dodging off and on rain showers, we went up there one day and found the entrance to the path. It was promising when we saw a number of different rose bushes at the southern entrance to the path. However, as we walked along the path, we noticed that many of the rose bushes were similar, and that many of them were neglected. As we continued along the path, we got up to the Foley Public Works department that bordered the path and the rose bushes, well, they sort of petered out. It was well less than a mile walk from where we started. To say the Wilbourne Antique Rose Trail was disappointing is an understatement.
That same day, we decided to drive out to Fort Morgan where Mobile Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile Point. Built in 1834 as the first line of defense for Mobile Bay, Fort Morgan is a national historic landmark and is open for walking tours during most days. Fort Morgan is situated 22 miles to the west of Gulf Shores on a two-lane highway that also takes you to a ferry that crosses the mouth of Mobile Bay to Dauphin Island, located just south of Mobile. By the time we got out there and were in line to pay to drive in, a pelting, wind-driven rain had just started. We also noticed that the water was too rough for the ferry to operate that day. Looking at one another, we decided to ditch Fort Morgan and head back toward Gulf Shores/Orange Beach.
Then an all-time low experience for any vacation we had ever been on happened the next day...
After a very nice meal for our anniversary dinner, my wife woke up in the middle of the night with stomach pains. She ended up having the flu. And it was bad. She was miserable as she passed between the bed and the bathroom for much of the early morning hours and into the next day.
Me? I felt fine. Well, I think I was a little hungover from a combination of beers, lemonade and vodka drinks, and a bottle of wine we shared with our dinner. At least, I thought I was a little hungover. But I felt fine enough to go out to a store to get my wife some saltine crackers, applesauce and a Sprite to help calm her stomach. Upon returning, she was still lying in bed moaning that this was the worst case of flu she had ever encountered in her life. (I seriously doubted that as I gave her a helluva flu bug nearly 20 years ago where we were both nearly incapacitated for two days.)
She thought it was possibly food poisoning from the meal we had the night before. But, as I explained to her, we both pretty much had the same thing, sharing bites of our seafood entrees as we usually do when we go to a nice restaurant. So, if SHE had food poisoning, why didn't I? She chalked it up to my ironclad stomach.
On top of all this, the sun had come out and it was actually the nicest day since we had arrived along the Alabama Gulf Coast. The wind was still brisk out of the east-southeast, but away from the beach it was very nice with temperatures in the mid-70's. My wife actually told me that I should go out and do what I wanted to do for the day, but I decided to hang out with her and make sure that she was going to be OK.
And it was a good thing that I did. About 11:30, I started to feel rotten. I ended up getting in bed and pulling the covers over the top of me. My stomach was upset and I was getting chills. I realized that whatever my wife had, I now had. The rest of the afternoon featured periodic trips to the bathroom getting sick for the first time since I was in France about 7 years ago. And when I wasn't in the bathroom, I was lying in bed shivering.
All the time that my flu was raging, my wife was starting to feel better. She took a shower, got dressed and along about 2:00 p.m., she decided to take the car and go get some other supplies for me. It was a miraculous turnaround for her while I was in the throes of a full-on attack of the flu. She even went out and got a sandwich that evening while I laid in bed not wanting anything to eat or drink.
I woke up at 1:30 in the morning and was thirsty. I had a bottle of water on my side of the bed and I sat up to take a drink. Hmmm... My stomach didn't hurt any longer. No more chills. I felt dehydrated and the water was helping me with that. I was just like my wife - after about 12 to 14 hours after I started to feel rotten, I was fine. It was very strange. (We're still debating whether or not it was the flu or food poisoning in conversations we've had with people regarding our vacation. She thinks it was food poisoning and has been staying away from seafood - especially oysters - since we got home. I think it was the flu as we weren't sick at the same time like people get with food poisoning.)
With one day lost in our already short time in Orange Beach/Gulf Shores, we decided to stay an extra day in the area rather than drive up to Birmingham where we were going to take in what we had heard was a thriving craft beer scene in that city. In hindsight, it turned out that we probably should have gone on to Birmingham.
Our make-up day consisted of walking along the beach and taking in some of the sights in and around the coastal area. We had noticed a pier that was part of Gulf State Park, a state park with two miles of white sand beaches in between Orange Beach and Gulf Shores. After pulling into the parking lot, I walked over to the machine to pay for parking, a young man, his wife and their two kids came up to us and he said, "Hey, I have almost two hours left on this parking pass. You guys can just have it." We thought it was very nice of him to do that (we saved a couple bucks) and very odd that they were leaving so soon. Then when we went out on the pier, we sort of realized why.
First of all there was a charge to get on the pier - I think it was 4 bucks a person. But then getting out on the pier, the wind was still howling and it wasn't pleasant to be hanging around out there. The waves were crashing into the supports and it was causing my wife to be somewhat queasy as we stood on the pier. She doesn't like bridges all that much to begin with and the waves were sending sea spray up on the pier.
The pier, itself, was still undergoing repairs from the extensive damage that was caused by Hurricane Sally, a category 2 hurricane that made landfall at Orange Beach on September 16 of last year. The nearby Lodge at Gulf State Park, a nice beach front-hotel under the Hilton banner, also suffered substantial damage from the 110 mph sustained winds and had recently re-opened. A number of buildings in the area were still under construction over 8 months after the hurricane hit. On top of the destruction caused by the winds from Hurricane Sally, it also caused localized flooding as the storm was not a typical hurricane that races on-shore and then turns into a tropical system inland. Hurricane Sally moved at a 2 to 3 mile per hour pace dumping over 20 inches of rain along the coast. Combined with the high winds, the storm surge and the flooding, it was the worst hurricane to hit the area in over 20 years.
We tried to get a room for the extra night at the Hilton Garden Inn in Orange Beach, but they were still undergoing renovations from the storm and many of the rooms were not available. And all the renovated rooms had been sold out at the hotel the extra night we wanted to stay. We ended up at a Hampton Inn in Gulf Shores, about a mile from the beach. My wife was OK with that. "We can hang out around the pool this afternoon," she said as we pulled into the parking lot there. However, when we looked out at the pool, we saw that it was closed. "You've GOT to be kidding me," my wife said in an exasperated tone. "Well, that clinches it. This is a shitty vacation!" It was at that point when we realized we should have gone on to Birmingham.
We did go out later on and hit the only brewery in the area, Big Beach Brewing. We tried their flagship beer, the Hundred Daze IPA, but we ended up liking their Area 251 hazy IPA better. We hung out on their patio enjoying a late afternoon craft beer.
The brewery is owned by dentist Jim Shamburger and his wife, Julie. Dr. Shamburger's daughter got him a home brew kit about 10 years ago and he immediately loved brewing his own beers. The little kit turned into a full-blown hobby for Shamburger who started to brew beers between the stilts under their house in Orange Beach. It turned out there wasn't a brewpub or microbrewery in the area and the couple saw the need for one. In October of 2016 the Shamburgers opened Big Beach Brewery. Like many places around the Gulf Shores/Orange Beach area, Big Beach Brewery features live music three or four nights a week.
After dinner that last evening, we ventured back out to Hilton Garden Inn in Orange Beach and they let us use their access to the beach for a sunset walk. The wind was still brisk, but not as bad as it was earlier in the day. It gave us one last chance to enjoy the sand and surf before we had to head back north the next day.
Oh! And here's a tip if you want good ice cream. My wife kept seeing this little place on Gulf Shores Parkway, less than a mile from the beach called Matt's Homemade Alabama Ice Cream. She finally talked me into stopping one evening when we were driving around Gulf Shores and I'm glad we did. The ice cream was fabulous. It was pricey, but in my estimation, it was worth it. Look for Matt's (they have two locations on Gulf Shores Parkway) if you make it down to Gulf Shores.
We took off after breakfast the next day and drove in heavy traffic along I-65 between Mobile and Montgomery, then again from Montgomery to Birmingham encountering stop-and-go traffic at times in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. We did stop at a Whataburger on the north side of Birmingham - which turned out to be an ordeal in itself that then turned out to be the worst experience I've ever had in the over 40 years of seeking out Whataburger restaurants. The burger gave me a stomachache, so much that I couldn't even eat dinner that evening when we got to Paducah, KY. But it was typical of the vacation that we had. We did eat at a few good places while we were there and I'll have write-ups about those places. But my wife summed it up perfectly as we took off from Gulf Shores to head back home. "You know, there are times where we've cried when we had to leave some of the vacation spots we've been to over the years," she said. "But after this vacation, I just really want to get back home."
Yep, that pretty much sums up our vacation to the Gulf Shores of Alabama...
That's a bummer! At least you had some decent food.
Posted by: Sarah | June 09, 2021 at 09:11 AM