We arrived in Gulf Shores on November 1st and we stayed 2 months at Gulf State Park. This was the first park where we weren’t ready to leave - it felt like we still had more areas to see and explore!
When we arrived, it was late afternoon and there were plenty of people out, but traffic wasn’t bad. As we pulled into the campground, we were following a motorhome and ended up following it all the way to our spot - our neighbor across from us had arrived at the same time as us! It was great having Dwight as a neighbor for the two months we were here.
After we settled in, we quickly started to realize that we were here in the off season. Some of the restaurants were closed until January, stores were empty once the sun went down (imagine having the grocery store almost to yourself at 6 pm!), and it was easy to get seated right away at the popular restaurants during supper time.
The weather during our two months was also having an off season moment! Some days were nice and sunny, but most days were a little cool and/or rainy. There were several days of unusually thick fog and a freeze warning that lasted a couple of days. The active storm pattern gave us several opportunities to test out our weather radio! Thankfully the area we were in didn’t have anything more than severe thunderstorms while we were there.
Gulf State Park has several different amenities, but my two favorites were the almost 30 miles of trails for biking and walking and the easy access to the beach.
I did see one alligator in the water at Shelby Lake, but never did see any along the trails in the areas where others have seen them. I did spot several different types of birds though!
While I never did get up early enough to watch the sunrise on the beach, I did capture several sunset photos at the beach.
The Gulf water had cooled off an unusual amount by November. That, plus the several days of red flags for the strong currents and high surf, made it almost impossible to actually spend much time in the water.
The beach here was almost always covered in sea shells. I loved taking photos of them! Sometimes the shells were in almost perfect condition, other times it looked like someone dumped a truckload of shells on the beach. Several of the shells also had a variety of colors to them and were more than the typical shades of grey that I’ve seen on some beaches.
The best part of our stay here was having so much company! Both of our daughters were able to spend some time with us, as did Tracy’s family. Thanksgiving was spent at a huge potluck dinner at Flora-Bama. It was an interesting experience eating dinner with 1500+ people! The weekend of Thanksgiving, Tracy and I did a 5K as part of the Coastal Half Marathon & 5K run. I had decided to walk it and Tracy decided to walk with me instead of running it.
For Christmas, we made the decision to drive back to Missouri and Iowa. Of course this was during the time that most of the US was experiencing freezing weather - including Gulf Shores. We somewhat winterized our RV before leaving for the long weekend. We did this by blowing the water out of the waterlines and turning the water off. We made sure our propane tanks were full, turned the furnace down to 50 degrees, and hoped for the best! Thankfully we didn’t have any issues when we returned!
Speedy and Snickers spent the long week in a kennel in Gulf Shores. I knew this wouldn’t be a favorite time for them, but with the holiday weekend I didn’t want to ask someone to check on them, nor did I want to worry about trying to keep the camper warm enough for them during the freezing temperatures.
During the holidays, Gulf State Park made the trails festive by hiding “snowmen” along the trail system. It was a fun challenge to try and find all of them! Sadly I was only able to find 8 of the 10 snowmen.
We also explored Fort Morgan and the town of Fairhope. I’ll write about both of them in a separate post.
