From Deseret News archives:
Lower Alabama
Mobile and its environs are great for R&R
Back in the early 1800s, this fever raged throughout the South. In those days, cotton was king, and after someone discovered that Alabama's soil was perfect for growing it, folks from Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas couldn't get there fast enough. It was almost as bad as the gold fever that would come along 50 years later.
These days, the fever's still out there, although the symptoms have changed. You no longer desire to go out and plant cotton. Instead, you find yourself:
— Wanting to spend lazy days doing little more than sitting in the sun or splashing in the ocean.
— Needing to walk along stretches of sandy beach, listening to the call of sea birds and reveling in the sea breeze.
— Looking for an abundance of flowers as a welcome sign of spring.
— Hoping for an opportunity for "messing around in boats." (As the "Wind in the Willows" folks say, there's nothing "half so much worth doing" as that.)
— Wishing to hear a few y'alls and Southern drawls.
When these symptoms strike, the best way to deal with them is to do what the natives do — head for L.A. (That's the name the locals use for lower Alabama.)
Alabama has a beach? Yes, a wonderful stretch of sugar-soft sand runs along the Gulf of Mexico from Florida on the east to Mississippi on the west, broken up by a few islands and the large Mobile Bay in the center.
My sister and her family first caught Alabama fever and decided to head there for spring break. They had heard that the Alabama beaches catered to families, as opposed to the college-student infested ones in Florida. I decided to join them, and we found the family atmosphere and Southern hospitality charming.
We ended up on Perdido Key, a part of Orange Beach, on the eastern edge of the state. We could — and quite often did — walk to Florida, about a mile up the beach.
Orange Beach is bounded on the other side by Gulf State Park, which runs into Gulf Shores, another resort community, the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge and then on to historic Fort Morgan point. That's the end of the road, but you can take a ferry over to Dauphin Island, on the other side of Mobile Bay, and it is connected to the mainland by a bridge. Guide books tell you it's worth a trip to the island just to cross the bridge, which affords a view of the Mississippi Sound on one side and Mobile Bay on the other.
That would come later for us. First we had some serious beach work.
