We’re leaving Mobile tomorrow (11/30) for Pensacola, FL. Mobile has been very nice and an interesting stop. Temps have been in the mid to high 70s, just beautiful.

We spent most of yesterday touring the battleship Alabama, now permanently docked and restored for tours here in Mobile. Sorry I forgot my camera! It is utterly awesome how large, complex and powerful a battleship really is. John and Ben S. could probably spend a week there. All the original equipment is onboard and set up as “ready to go” including the 5 ft. tall 2 ton main gun shells all racked inside the turret base with mechanical lifts for the powder sacks and shells to feed the big guns. There is room after room of galley, dining rooms (to feed 2,500 men) soda fountain, tightly packed bunk quarters, ship’s hospital, machine rooms, engine roome, the command center with the giant glass circle for plotting all ships in the area (just like in the movies), huge generators, al whole room full of 2-way radios (John S. favorites), huge turbine engines……..it goes on forever!

Today we visited Bellengrath Gardens, which is a spectacular home, estate and gardens of a mid 20th century businessman in Mobile. He bought one of the first Coca Cola bottling franchises in the South and made millions bottling Coke. He and his wife had no children, so they left their huge estate and 60 acre gardens to a trust to be on permanent public display. The trust has plenty of funds to keep the gardens really beautiful. It was a mid-70s day and the flowers were in bloom in many parts of the gardens. They were just finishing setting up for their annual Christmas lights extravaganza, and expected over a thousand visitors to walk the pathways tonight, but there were only a dozen or so when we were there. The home was also interesting. 100% of their furnishings from the 1950s and all of their antique collections were there. WOW!












We ate at a couple of good seafood restaurants. Good seafood is plentiful here, of course. Downtown Mobile was a Ho Hum, but you can’t have everything.


There are black crowned night herons here every night on the pilings at the dock. They are about 2 ft. long and they fly in every night just after dusk to sit on the pilings near the lights all night to swoop down to eat fish they see in the harbor. They have fairly large eyes for herons. I have been trying to take a picture of one for 3 nights, but the camera flash won’t reach 15 feet to the piling they favor and when we shine our big spotlight on them, they fly off. I can just imagine them telling the other herons “Damn tourists with the searchlights….now I’m blinded by that light and can’t see to catch fish for an hour!” This picture is the best I could do.