Mobile Bay

We were in the Mobile Bay area for the entire time we stayed in southern Alabama but didn’t get to the city of Mobile until our last weekend.  We had been to the city of Fairhope on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay a few times as our campground was close to Fairhope.  One thing that we always noticed about Fairhope was that they had beautiful flower planter boxes throughout the town.  It gave an already pretty town nice splashes of color.

For our trip around the bay, we drove south to the Gulf at Gulf Shores.  We followed the shore line west only to find out that we hadn’t paid enough attention to the map that that the shore drive didn’t go through, so we had to circle back to Gulf Shores and just a bit north to get a road that would go through.  But the houses along the Gulf were very colorful and we enjoyed our detour.

 

We took the ferry that traverses the mouth of Mobile Bay from Fort Morgan in the east to Dauphin Island on the west.  One bay thing about a ferry is that if you arrived just a couple minutes after the ferry has left the dock, you have quite a wait until the next sailing (somehow we know this).  There are oil drilling platforms in the Bay right along the ferry route.  It was also through these waters that produced one of the most famous naval commands of all time:  “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead”  issued by
Admiral Farragut in attacking the bay during the Civil War’s battle of Mobile. After a quick look around Dauphin Island we headed north across a bridge with a very steep ramp section to move up to Mobile.  It was dark by the time we actually arrived in Mobile so we just had dinner without much exploring.  But we did drive drive through Mobile in the daylight as we headed west to Mississippi.  You first take a long bridge across the northern end of Mobile Bay.  Upon reaching an island just east of Mobile you pass down through the George C. Wallace tunnel under the water and under a major shipping channel of the Port of Mobile.  You can’t help but think, what if one of this ships happened to hit the tunnel, but thank goodness it didn’t happen to us.