Travels with Gunther and Kara

Today was another great day here in Gulf State Park. Connie had some work to do in the morning so Neil worked on some computer stuff and went running while she did that. Once she was done…we headed off to The Gulf for a burger and beer on the beach. Our friend Sparky from http://whereseldo.blogspot.com recommended this place as having most excellent burgers and she was right. We got really juicy burgers with some home made aioli dressing on them…Connie had cheddar cheese and Neil had spicy pepperjack; we had them along with a coupla cans of beer and they were quite delicious. We sat next to an older couple from Michigan who have retired down here and turned out they had visited a lot of places we have been as well.

After lunch we went to a local Winn Dixie that was supposed to have good beer and booze selections. We were looking for Maduro beer like we had in Cedar Key and for Cabin Fever maple flavored whiskey from New Hampshire…we struck out on both of these so we headed home for our final chore of the day…taxes.

We had finished and submitted our federal ones yesterday and dropped the Virginia ones off at the post office on the way to lunch…so all that was left was the Alabama ones for the timber company distributions. Luckily; Alabama has an online version now which is much, much easier than the old paper version was so we finished that up in about an hour and decided to have a little fun.

There is a trail here in the park named the Alligator Marsh Trail about two miles long or so. We walked over to the beginning and headed out. It sort of wanders through the marshy grassland to the north of the park and we saw some pretty decent birds on our walk.

First up was some nice white flowers that Connie found followed by a mourning dove up in a tree, a mockingbird, and a little brownish bird that we couldn’t identify very well.

After that we hit on the mother lode of Red Winged Blackbirds. We’ve been hearing these critters all week but haven’t actually spotted any until today…when we spotted a bunch of them and got some nice pictures. Notice the little red and yellow epaulets they have on their shoulders as well as a couple that are sort of puffed up when calling for the females. It must be mating season because we saw a couple of dozen pairs swooping around in their mating rituals. We were  actually amazed that they’re this hard to see…our past experience has been that they just sit there and call and don’t care about people being around so it’s easy to get decent pictures. Connie is really glad we finally got to see some we can take pictures of.

Dinner was left over ribs from last night with some rice; it was even better today after it had oodled awhile.

Cyas.

Monday we just stayed around the rig and worked…the only thing that really happened was we saw this Hermit Thrush outside the rig…Neil grabbed a shot through the window before he flew away.

Dinner last night was at Wentzels…we only ate cooked oysters but one of them must have been going bad as Connie was awake a lot last night with tummy issues. Neil woke up with them so he was running about 6 hours behind her symptoms. The good news is that he knew he would get better; the bad news was that he had to suck it up for the morning while we headed out on our travels.

First stop was the Catholic Cemetery over in Mobile to visit Neil’s parents grave site and install some flowers (well, it was actually our second stop…the first one was at a Krispy Kreme for some still hot from the fryer Original Glazed Donuts for breakfast. Quite yummy!!).The ones on the right side are the ones we added; the left must have been left by one of Neil’s brothers who still live in Mobile.

Nearby we found Neil’s paternal grandparents grave site

and while we looked around and found a lot of other Laubenthal plots we did not find his great grandparents site. After that we ran over to his cousin Greg’s law office; Greg is the lawyer for the Laubenthal Land and Timber Company. We needed to handle some signatures/witnessing to transfer the stock into joint survivorship…and had a nice visit with Greg while we were handling the paperwork. Following that we headed off to Bellingrath Gardens south of Mobile down towards Dauphin Island. This estate was originally a fishing camp that was purchased as a home by Walter Bellingrath who owned the original Coca Cola bottling franchise in Mobile in 1917. He and his wife built quite opulent gardens and opened them to the public in the mid 1930’s or so. Construction of the gardens continued until he died in 1955…the estate was then left in trust for future generations to enjoy. We got mostly flower pictures, I won’t try to identify the individual types since there are over 500 different types of flowering plants on the grounds.

It was really hard to pick just a few to publish…but the good news is I have plenty left to use for future posts that don’t have anything to illustrate them.

We also found a neat fountain

and some sort of little brown bird on the try to the right of the walkway

as well as a little grotto down by the Fowl River which borders the property

There is this really nice little chapel adjoining one of the original guest houses on the property that now houses a collection of Boehm porcelain sculptures (mostly birds, we have a few reproductions of them ourselves although we left them in storage since they are fragile).

And Neil decided he needed to look like a bull rider with this bronze lion we stumbled across.

We found some beautiful Azaleas which are the signature flower of the Mobile area

Then, on a walk on the boardwalk through the estuary we spotted a Northern River Otter

and finally got a nice overview of the Mirror Lake which separates the house (which we didn’t tour) from the main garden section on the property.

The final section in the Gardens is the Asian-American garden which contains a lot of Japanese and Chinese architectural options like this arched bridge common in the Orient over canals

along with a number of walkways, small waterfalls, and contemplation areas (we made plentiful use of these for resting as we were getting sort of tired by this time.

On a Japanese themed building in the back of the garden we discovered how to spell Drink Coca Cola in Japanese

As a Coke bottler Mr. Bellingrath would have loved this touch.

Finally, as we departed the Asian garden we spotted this Red Headed Woodpecker overhead

and with that our tour ended. By this time it was after 1330 and we were getting pretty hungry. Connie had some meatloaf and Neil was finally feeling better enough to eat something so had some homemade chicken noodle soup. After that we headed home…stopping on the way at Winn Dixie to pick up some Italian Ice for dessert and than we spotted a Wendy’s across the street so we had a couple of small vanilla Frosty’s for afternoon snack; those really hit the spot. We got back to the rig about 1600 and after spending a few minutes while Connie tried again to solve a crisis for one of her students (it got solved but wasn’t optimum) we had a nap until it was time for dinner. Our original plan was to eat at Lulu’s…but given our tummy issues last night decided to just have a wine cooler and a couple of Chicken Pot Pies (Marie Callendar’s; the best we’ve found).

Tomorrow is another work day; Connie has a lot of irons in the fire right now so Neil will probably grab the “offsite” backup disks from BAT and the car and update our backups that we keep not in the house in case the worst happens.

Cyas.

Friday was pretty much a work day for Connie so Neil bailed about 1100 or so and went on a long bike ride. He went on the loop back country trail he went on with Connie the other day again to try and stay in the trees and out of the wind…it didn’t work very well so when he got to the end of the loop he zigged instead of zagged and came home another way that added another 3 or so miles to the ride…which was his main intention anyway. While on the ride he did stop at one of the overlooks and get this snapshot of a Great Blue Heron…it’s sort of lousy since it is’s an iPhone telephoto shot that was cropped to get it to be more than just a blue dot but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.

After the ride we lazed around the afternoon then headed over to the Elks Lodge for the Friday Evening fish fry. Cold draft beer for $8 a pitcher–check. Fried fish platter that was fried in corn meal instead of batter (the way God intended fish to be fried)–check. Delicious hushpuppies–check. Met nice folks to talk to who happened to be RVers staying at the state park near us and who had a great recommendation for the Elks Lodge in Great Falls, MT where we are going in a month or two–check. A great time was had by all and then we came home and split a piece of carrot cake that Neil bought from the Walmart (hey, we needed soda and were looking for Italian Ice…but they only had Luigi’s brand which we don’t like as it’s much more like ice cream than icy like an Italian Ice should be. Nothing wrong with Gelato but it ain’t Italian Ice.)

Today Connie worked on catching up some of her email backup, planned a bit more for upcoming travels, and had the all important afternoon siesta. Neil went running and then decided to test out this really neat new camera application he found for the iPhone named 360Panorama. This lets you take a panorama type photo and then shows it to you so that you can drag around in the photo and move around. He tested it out by taking one of out campsite. Anyway; click and drag around in the photo you see below and you’ll see how it works. Assuming it actually works once I post this; I can see some landscape pano’s in our future.

Bummer; you can’t insert Javascript code into a WordPress site…they’re worried about the security of running code. So; click here instead and it will show you the panorama instead, it will open in a new browser window or tab depending on your computer settings. He needs to play with this a bit more and figure out how to get the exposure a little better; the sky got kinda overexposed and he’s not sure if that’s overexposure or just the overcast but bright sky we see outside, it could really be either.

Dinner tonight was Coq au Vin (that’s chicken in wine sauce) served with noodles. Coq au Vin was invented as a way to take your old rooster who had outlived his usefulness as a hen impregnator and turn him into dinner. Unfortunately, old roosters got kinda tough and so the French (God bless them for their cooking, they have made life bearable for the rest of us…their politics, not so much though.) figured that if you cooked it with onions, bacon, garlic, mushrooms, and wine it would get tender and tasty…and by golly they’re right. After cooking the veggies and browning the chicken I added some Malbec wine, a couple of chopped Pepperincini peppers, and a dash of balsamic vinegar. We served it over noodles and with the rest of the Malbec and it was really good. Here’s a shot of it; we got leftovers that we’ll probably have for dinner tomorrow served over some polenta (the Italian version of grits…the only grits Connie likes).

Tomorrow is Mass in the AM and then we gotta go fill BAT with fuel for our trip a week from Monday we normally drive BAT once a week while we’re parked so that will accomplish two goals with one trip. Don’t know what Monday holds; probably a work day since Tuesday we have a monster local trip planned; we will be off really early to visit Neil’s parents gravesite, visit Greg McAtee to handle some Laubenthal Land and Timber business (transferring Neil’s stock to joint with right of survivorship), a visit to Bellingrath Gardens south of Mobile (since Connie likes gardens and flowers) and then we’ll probably stop by Lulu’s Restaurant (Jimmy Buffet’s sister) or Wentzels (whichever we don’t’ eat at Monday night).

Cyas

Today was supposed to be a fun day…but when the phone rang early Connie discovered she had an issue with one of her students; which meant that by the time she got it sorted out it was almost lunch. Undeterred; we fixed us up a couple of wraps, added some chips, grabbed a bottle of water and the cameras and headed out for a hike at the Pine Beach Trail at the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge.

The NWR is spread out in several sections located along the barrier island that forms Gulf Shores. Heading west from Gulf Shores all the way to the end of the island you get to Fort Morgan which is one of the two Civil War era forts that guards the entrance to Mobile Bay; Fort Jefferson is located in the eastern end of the barrier island on the west side of the bay. The two forts are about 3 or 4 miles apart and were designed to menace any shipping trying to enter Mobile Bay. We didn’t go all the way out to the end of the island but only about 2/3 of the way…arriving about 1030 or so and heading off on our 4 mile round trip hike. It’s about a mile through the pine forest to Gator Lake then another mile across the sand dunes to the beach proper…which meant that 2 of our 4 miles we were slogging through sand…and Gulf coast sand is really, really fine and hard to walk on, particularly up and down the dunes.

Our first stop was the watchtower at Gator Lake where we grabbed a picture of the lake itself

and then as we headed down the causeway between Gator Lake and Little Lagoon we spotted a Ruddy Duck out in the Lagoon.

Continuing on a bit we got into the dunes where we spotted this abandoned and hurricane destroyed house; it looked to be most of 100 years old although we really didn’t have much of an idea.

Finally we got down the the beach itself; this is looking to the East back towards Gulf Shores.

The beach itself is probably 250 yards wide and composed of really white, fine sand. Looking the other way here’s a shot of Connie getting her View of the Day picture for her Twitter account.

After taking those we hiked back across the beach and dunes; then returned across the causeway to the tower and sat for awhile having lunch. While we were there Neil grabbed some bracketed sequences to do these two HDR shots of Gator Lake.

That’s Gator Lake on the right in the bottom picture and Little Lagoon at the left side. The first picture is Gator Lake looking a little farther right.

Heading home after that we sat out in the sun awhile then Neil fixed some beef stir fry for dinner. It was pretty good although we should have made up some fresh wasabi instead of using the leftover stuff from a week or so ago…it had lost all of it’s heat. Still pretty tasty though. Tomorrow is more work; Connie is starting to get her next class of students organized…and she sure hopes the next class isn’t as needy as the current one has been.

Cyas.

Man…what a gorgeous day it was today. It started a little overcast but by about 1000 or so had cleared up nicely and was up in the mid 70’s. After breakfast and bike ride/email/web browsing we headed off on a  bike ride. Connie found a nice paved trail named the Hugh F. Banyon Backcountry Trail (I realize there appears to be a discrepancy between paved and backcountry…but I didn’t name the trail). Anyway; we ended up riding about 12 miles, stopping for lunch halfway through for lunch of apple and granola bars. Here’s a shot of Connie heading out on the trail

And here’s a shot of us while we were stopped for lunch.

About a mile before we got back into the campground we saw this Great Egret

and an Osprey that was too far away to get a decent picture of sitting on the nest (we got a shot and it’s recognizable as an Osprey but that’s about it…Neil just had the pocket camera today).

We got back to the rig and had a nap in the sun for a couple of hours while we listened to podcasts. After that it was off to the Elks Lodge for a coupla beers and then we stopped by the Shrimp Shack and picked up an Oyster Po’boy for dinner…which we split with a wine cooler.

After that it was TV and bed…tomorrow we’re working and doing laundry as we’re almost out of underwear:-)

Cyas

It was a pretty slow Sunday around here. We headed off to Mass early and stopped by Hazel’s Nook for breakfast. After that we came home, Neil went on a bike ride, and we basically lazed around all afternoon. Around 1700 we got off our recliners and fired up the grill. Neil broke out some Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Guinness Black Ale (it was Saint Paddy’s day after all) and then we tossed dinner onto the grill. Last night’s dinner was a half of a pork tenderloin rubbed with coffee grounds and chipotle peppers then grilled to a nice medium rare. He also made some marinated chicken breasts that were then slathered with some home made barbecue sauce for tonight’s dinner (well, there was this one casualty…which was unfortunately eaten…but then he needed to have what he called a “test chicken” to make sure they were edible).

After that we just watched TV and read/listened to podcasts until bedtime. 

Today is pretty much a work day; Neil worked on the slides for his New Horizons Rally Electronic Stuff presentation for late next month while Connie coordinated some of her students paperwork. Neil is going on a run in a bit and I don’t know what’s happening after lunch. We might do laundry or might leave it to early tomorrow morning. The laundry is open 24 hours and Neil figures if he goes over there about 0730 or o it should be pretty much deserted and he can get in and out as quickly as possible.

Cyas.

We really have to thank our friends Sparky and Eldo for blogging last winter about Gulf State Park; it’s a really, really great place to stay. Gate is open and registration is manned 24 hours a day as is the laundry so you can get everything done on your schedule instead of somebody else’s.

Today we got up and lazed around in the morning then after lunch decided to go on a hike in the park. We found a couple of nice trails that totaled about 3 miles and although we never were more than about 150 yards from parked RVs amazingly enough most of the  time we could not see any of them.

Our first find was Red Winged Blackbirds…as at our last stop in Low Key Hideaway we could hear a lot of their calls but were unable to actually get a picture of one. We saw a few briefly as they flew but they have been amazingly elusive…typically they are as common to see as sparrows in our experience so we have no idea what the deal is.

We heard and spotted what really sounded like Mockingbirds…except they were brownish instead of gray…a quick check of Peterson’s when we got home revealed that they are Bahama Mockingbirds.

Neil got the obligatory shot of Connie hiking down the trail

and then we arrived about at the halfway point at the Middle Lake overlook where we got this nice shot of the water and reeds looking southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Out last find was a Red Bellied Woodpecker; there are dozens of these in the park but this is the first one we saw that we could get a decent photo of.

Shortly after this we got to the end of the trail which is at the far end of the RV site section of the park where we turned around yesterday before we parked and we walked back up the road to the rig. Neil stopped by our next door neighbor and thanked her for rescuing us last night…she was out walking her dog about 2200 and knocked on our door to ket us know that the dome light in the car was on. Neil went out and didn’t find anything wrong but was able to get it to go off…he decided the switch was stuck. Thankfully our neighbor was helpful enough to alert us so we didn’t end up with a dead battery this morning.

After the hike we had a shower…and Neil decided he was too lazy to cook the pork and chicken he had taken out earlier tonight…so we tossed them into the fridge for tomorrow’s grilling. After a delicious wine cooler sitting out under the awning we headed off to find beer and dinner. We passed a place called The Hangout…back in the day this was the only place to go in Gulf Shores…but today it’s a 2 story 25,000 square foot monstrosity. Neil was amazed as we drove around the beach road at how much development has happened here since he last visited (but then it was 1974 or so the last time he was here).

Lo’ and behold; as we drove down the beach road Connie noticed a Wentzel’s on the side of the road. For those in the know about Mobile…Wentzel’s is an old local seafood joint specializing in oysters…their sign way back then said “Fried, stewed, or nude.” for the ways you could get them. In about 3 seconds we made the decision to eat there, made a quick u-ey (U Turn) and pulled in.

DInner was a pitcher of Yuengling beer, a 16 oyster sampler platter (which contained Oysters Rockerfeller with spinach, Grilled Oysters with Parmesan, Bienville Oysters with shrimp, crab, and Parmesan sauce and Oysters Monterey with Jalapeños and Cheddar cheese. They were really good but we were still hungry so we had a Crab Cake appetizer and a Smoked Tuna Dip appetizer as well. Yummy. After that we came home for another wine cooler and Neil is going to make cake and ice cream for dessert. Neil found this really neat recipe for microwave cake awhile back called 3-2-1 cake…I’ll post the recipe if you want. Anyway…it’s super easy to make and is designed to bake in a coffee mug in the microwave. Push a caramel into the middle before baking, put some ice cream on top and you have hot, fresh dessert. The nice thing about it is you can make 2 servings at a time and it’s always fresh made.

Don’t know what tomorrow will bring yet…Mass and breakfast out in the morning and then who knows what for the afternoon followed by grilled pork/chicken for dinner. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow night and Monday so we’ll stay home and work on stuff then have more fun on Tuesday.