This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,000 and 20 for Friday the 29th of December 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Alabama to Florida.
It is part of the series Travel.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
We start traveling across the Gulf Coast on our way to Florida.
Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our series about RV Travels.
And we are now in Alabama, Gulf Shores and it is January the 8th of 2023.
So while we're having breakfast we started researching options.
For our stay here, there are some attractions worth checking out.
We will undoubtedly try a few, but we felt the need for outdoor activities, so we went
to Gulf State Park and did some hiking on the trails there.
I think we did about three miles, which was quite enough for us.
So then we came back to the RV to rest.
As I get older my body can do less and it takes longer to recover.
So I lay down for a two hour nap which I needed.
Well, by the end of the day I started to feel like maybe this wasn't me just being tired.
I might be coming down with a cold, so I went to bed early.
Next day January 9th I slept in late, took it easy all day, I still had a headache
and back pain, neither is extreme fortunately.
January 10th Gulf Shores, I had a bad night.
The headache and the back ache bothered me all night.
My legs were cramping and I managed to sweat until the sheets were wet, so it's another
day of rest to try and beat this thing whatever it is.
January 11th Gulf Shores, I did better last night and felt better in the morning,
so after breakfast we did some shopping for RV supplies.
Our fresh water supply equipment was displaying problems like leaking, so we got a new
fresh water hose, another one is a back up, a y connector for the water supply and a
water pressure regulator.
We did that quite expeditiously.
Now I have to say those hoses we ended up returning them, they just they tended the
leak, I think are just poor manufacturing, anyway we had a couple of other hoses including
our heated one, so after we did the shopping we went into mobile to see the USS Alabama,
which is a World War II battleship.
Now many of the World War II battleships were eventually sold off for scrap, but in 1960 some
citizens of Alabama raised the money to bring the ship to mobile bay, where it now forms
the core of a military museum.
There is also a World War II submarine, the USS Drum on display, they have other things
as well such as aircraft and armor, but battleship and submarine are the real attractions here.
They have set them each up with self-guided tours that take you over most of the ship,
and it does give you a little idea of what is like to serve on these vessels.
When we started planning this trip I was thinking mostly about the NASA facilities that
we would visit, but it turned out to be rather more than I thought of a military history
trip, but when you have attractions like the National World War II Museum in the USS
Alabama you really have to visit them.
We practice a form of serendipitous travel where we go someplace and look around to see what
they have to offer, and usually there are things worth visiting.
So golf shores again on January 12th another rainy day, so we stayed in.
January 13th was time to move on, so we didn't really spend as much time doing anything
in Alabama compared to what we thought we would when we booked a week stay.
Well, life is like that sometimes.
So on the 13th we got a reasonably early start in golf shores and then got back on the
I-10 into the Florida Panhandle to get to our next park which is in Panacea, Florida.
I started the day strong and thought that just maybe I'd put that illness behind me.
But by the time we got to Panacea I was still feeling kind of crappy and so I got another
night with a lot of sleep 12 hours worth and it was cold all day, a bad freezing but
not a lot above it.
Yeah, on the 14th in still in Panacea, Florida it's still cold probably will be for
the next few days that is too bad because most of the things we want to do here are outdoor
activities. I'm hoping it gets better in the next few days but for today I'm staying in.
Panacea on the 15th of January, I slept in and felt a little bad when I got up and so
I stayed in for one more day but we did go out to buy more propane and do the shopping
and I started to feel better.
So I decided that I would just go to bed at my normal time which is like around 930 and
get up at my usual time which is 6 a.m. and get out tomorrow.
So Panacea on the 16th this was Martin Luther King day in the United States.
I put my plan into action. I got up at 6 a.m. Showered and head breakfast. I still felt
good.
Now we had reserved a boat ride for later in the week and we looked around for some local
hiking opportunities. We picked a hike in the St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge called
the Otter Lake Loop Trail. It's about 4 miles long and it's probably a little longer
than my back would hold up for it.
But on a nice sunny day with blue skies it was just great to be outdoors. I used a new
app both to pick out the hiking trail and to follow it. It's a paid app called All Trails.
It's not a cheap app but I think it provides value for money. You can get all the details
in advance such as the length of the hike how difficult it is, how much elevation change
you will experience. You can read reviews and see photos from previous hikers. Best of
all it tracks your progress along the map of the trail and sends an alert to your phone
if you missed the turn. We got such an alert and had the back track about 40 meters when
we missed our turn.
I think this app is a keeper for me. Panacea on January 17th today the weather is perfect
for being outdoors. So we headed off to Bald Point State Park to do a little more hiking.
Many of the trees seem to have blackened trunks which I suspect means fire occurred at some
point. The long leaf pine trees dominate the landscape but they seem to be mostly bare
trunk with just a crown of needles at the top. The park has a river that empties into a lake
and we are mostly hiking around all of that water. We thought it might empty into the ocean
but it doesn't seem to do so. I wanted to see the Gulf of Mexico and this is our last stop
along the Gulf shore so when we finished in the park we drove to a nearby public beach.
The trees and driftwood had fantastic shapes making this far different from the Atlantic
coast of New England. One nice thing is that on this beach and on the trails we have been
on dogs on leash are welcome. You are of course expected to pick up after you.
This might be a good moment for me to mention something that I have links to all
of the photos for some reason you want to see them and so you can either get them off
of the web page or I put links to my flicker account in the show notes so you can see
day by day what photos we took. Again in panacea today we headed and this is on the 18th
of January we headed to Acula Springs State Park. Now a guy named Ed Ball bought up all
this property and put a fence around it which pissed off a lot of the locals but then
he sold it to the state and they turned it into a public park. It was only about 25 minutes
away from where we were staying and there were several things to caught our eye. One was
the boat ride on the Acula River and Cheryl had bought our tickets and made our reservations
a few days previously. The other was a hike to a sinkhole. So we started with the hike which
went through some different woods from what we saw at St. Mark's and at Bald Point. There
seemed to be a lot of southern magnolia trees for instance and fewer of the long-leaf pine.
And the liken on the tree trunks was very striking almost like someone with a paintbrush
had gone around slapping paint on the trunks. At the end of the trail we came to the Cherokee
sink. The sinkhole did a 75 feet deep. We found some young folks swimming there. We
walked around to take some pictures and enjoy the view. There are caves off of the sinkhole
and diving is permitted though we didn't see anyone diving. Interestingly the brochure we
got when we entered the park stated that swimming is not permitted in the sinkhole though
that did not deter the kids. After we finished here we walked back to the lodge for our boat
ride. Now there's a major spring here which feeds the Acula River and that flows into the
St. Mark's river and then ultimately into the golf. Now part of the river is off limits
as a wildlife refuge but we went about a mile down river and then came back and along the
way we were stopping to view birds, alligators, all sorts of wildlife there are bald
eagles in the park but none of the bald eagles are on the river because the ospreys
drive them away. Oeagles are much larger than ospreys but apparently the ospreys are more
aggressive. It's like that saying it's not the size of the dog and the fight it's the size
of the fight and the dog. We did see one of the ospreys perched on top of the tree in the middle
of the river. Now this river was used for films including the Tarsan films with Johnny
Weissmuller and the creature from the black lagoon. We did see one alligator with a bird in
its mouth, dinner time for alligator and a group of young alligators resting not far from
mom. So a fun day at the Acula Springs again in Panacea. This is on January 19th.
We went for a walk just a few blocks from the park first to a boat launch into the bay and
into the Gulf specimen marine laboratory and aquarium. Now they collect specimens of marine
life and ship them to universities, aquariums and laboratories all over and they have
their own little aquarium where among other things they nurse injured animals. We saw
a couple of sea turtles that are due to be released back into the wild next week for example.
Some of the aquarium tanks let you touch the marine life which is big with the kids but
you get reasonably up close with the animals in any case. Now this is our last full day in
Panacea and it's interesting how we go into small out of the way place knowing nothing
about it and find fun things to do. This little aquarium was four blocks from our RV park
and we spent an hour and a half there quite happily plus Cheryl found some earrings that
she liked of sea turtles. So this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off and
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