May 20, 2010 - Day Thirteen

Today we put Mobile, Alabama into our sights.

Our trailer had never been in Louisiana, so now we’d be adding two more states that the trailer had never been in, Mississippi and Alabama. And we’ve driven almost 3000 miles since we left home. So far, so good.

I got on the Internet looking for places to camp in Mobile. I found one called “Shady Acres”, but I’m usually put off by parks that have names heralding back to the 1930’s, since I fear they haven’t been updated since then. But the reviews I found about this RV park were very high, so I booked it.

The drive was uneventful but I was starting to worry about the tread depth on the truck tires as well as how one of trailer tires was wearing. We made it to Mobile in about three hours, an easy drive for us.

Shady Acres was located in a residential area of town, not too far from I-10 and very easy to get to. But as we pulled off the freeway and attempted to exit, our path was blocked by a police car with flashing lights. And here I thought the statute of limitations of my time in Alabama in the 1970’s had expired. It turned out that the cop was only blocking the road to allow a funeral procession to pass by.

Shady Acres was indeed shady, and we were assigned a pull-through spot. Within a few minutes I had the trailer unhitched, leveled, and the awning down.

By now we were convinced that Coco needed to go to the groomer to get a haircut like her “sister” Molly. Coco’s abundant brown coat was acting like a luxurious fur coat, it was cute, but way too warm in this hot weather. I found a groomer on the Internet and we made an appointment for the next morning.

We left the dogs in the air-conditioned trailer, and even though the South was still experiencing a July-like heat wave, we were ready to do some sightseeing of downtown Mobile, so off we went.

After some map confusion, we found a parking spot next to their large convention center. We walked to the park on the opposite side of the center where we were the only tourists, it appeared as the rest of the parks patrons were homeless people catching up on their sleep and a couple of people fishing in what appeared to me to be the dirty water of the Mobile Bay. Across the bay were shipyards where all sizes of ships were being built. Behind us was the Mobile skyline, fairly unimpressive except for two skyscrapers, both of which were Radisson hotels.

From the park we could see Fort Conde, one of the first settlements in Mobile. Hiking over there, we passed an Imax theater. It was wonderfully cool inside there, but the last Imax movie started 90 minutes earlier. So, in order to stay cool for a while longer, we visited their gift shop.

Once we were conveniently chilled we hiked a bit further, only to find ourselves in front on the former civic center which had now been converted into the Museum of Mobile. It was time to get cool again, so we entered. We didn’t want to pay to entrance fee, so we visited their gift shop to cool off again.

A little further down the street was Fort Conde, this was free and their welcome center was also air-conditioned. We cooled off again, and then did a quick tour of the small fort. Lucky for us the exhibit rooms were all air-conditioned.

Upon exiting the fort, we crossed the street to stand underneath a green umbrella. This is where we could pick up a free shuttle which would take us on a loop of downtown Mobile – also air-conditioned. The quick tour allowed us to view a town that appeared to me to be an extremely scaled down version of New Orleans.

We got back to the trailer, appreciated our air-conditioning, and had dinner. We also spent a considerable amount of time imagining what Coco would look like with her haircut.