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Gulf Shores - Part 2
Written by: Dominick A. Miserandino
Photography by: Margherita Miserandino
Save the Rats!
Day 1
Last night, we checked into Gulf Shores Plantation, which is not a real plantation, but a series of condo apartment buildings with rentable apartments. It’s at the end of the Fort Morgan Peninsula, which makes for a nice isolated and natural feeling. The apartment that we stayed in was big enough for a group of people.
"We could have brought down our friends and my mother." Margherita said upon entering.
"Being trapped in an apartment like that would have instantly given me an aneurism." I responded quickly. Sometimes there is no filter between my heart and my mouth.
As I mentioned, we arrived last night and it was only a 48-hour getaway so we did the one thing we never seem to do while traveling. We attempted to rest.
"Yes, we’ll go to the beach, but only for the morning, there’s a lot to see," Margherita said while running around the apartment packing a beach bag and scurrying for sunglasses.
The beach is literally right there. It seems that this is the big thing that everybody loves about Gulf Shores. I mentioned that the condos are like monoliths on the beach and this is mostly because of that visual discrepancy between the beach and the hotel. What needs to be emphasized is that when we say we’re on the beach, we really mean it. Okay, picture this yourself. You take a 15-story condominium and you’re going to put it near the beach. How close do you put it?
Now picture my little old Italian mother-in-law, La Madre, screaming at you while you place the building on the ground, "Oh stop it’a, that is’a too close’a. The wind’a will make’a fall. Too close’a to the water’a." Then, like a frustrated son-in-law you move it a few dozen yards closer just to piss her off. That is how close these are to the beach.
Since it’s not often we do something to relax, it is a bit of a foreign experience to write about the beach, but yes, the beaches were clean and fortunately, empty. As I mentioned, most people outside of this region don’t think of going to Alabama to go to the beach, but here it is and, luckily, here they’re not.
We walked, we talked, recouped and, then, Margherita got anxious and it was time to move on. Even though the beach was beautiful, perfectly clean and not crowded in the least she felt anxious. Maybe it was the lack of activity around us that caused her to try to balance her environment by acting anxious.
Next stop was Magnolia Springs. Magnolia Springs is a beautiful southern town with houses that seem to only exist in southern novels. In fact, it’s a place that is probably easier to describe by stealing from others. This is where the authors Fannie Flagg of Fried Green Tomatoes and Winston Groom of Forrest Gump fame came from. If you ever read those books and thought, "Wow, that must be pretty," well it is.
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Magnolia Springs Bed and Breakfast | |
First off, we stopped at Jesse’s Restaurant in the Moore Brothers Village Market, which is located in what once was the original post office. It is a wonderful restaurant attached to a great local market. I had the crab cakes and Margherita insisted on attempting to steal one. For dessert, they had a bread pudding that everybody was raving about, but I was focused on their peanut butter pie. Either way, I was quite happy drinking iced tea (sweet tea for the locals) and eating my peanut butter pie.
I mentioned the post office and that tangent should be revisited. Magnolia Springs is the only community in the country that delivers the mail year round via a boat. You actually have a mailbox on the river. The same river that meanders near everybody’s house is where the postman goes boating to deliver your letters.
This was a bit of the tour that we got from David Worthington who runs the Magnolia Springs Bed & Breakfast. David is a man who clearly loves Magnolia Springs as one would love a child. He knows every detail about the area, but is impassioned like a proud father. First of all, I will mention one thing about David’s tour that I think sums up the area. We stopped in the local bank. Yes, that introduction made it seem simple and boring, but in a way, instinctually I thought of a bank in such a manner, but here’s where it’s funny. The bank is a beautiful reconverted building with glass doors for which any home decorator would kill. The building, itself, is so antique that Bob Villa would be dying to turn it into pristine condition. Not that it’s dilapidated, but it is not a model for safes, bars and the like, type of banks, but then, you realize something. We are in a bank. A building that traditionally really needs to be secure. Shouldn’t somebody have broken in?
"Yes" David responded, "As a matter of fact somebody did."
"Were they caught?"
"Oh yeah, they just called up and luckily the car was rusty making it easy to identify. It’s a small area and the police had him in no time."
I loved that story. A community so close that they have a bank that can easily be broken into and when the thieves come they can recognize them and catch them in minutes. In a way, you’re wondering if it was more important that the bank be pretty than secure.
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A Scene from Magnolia Springs | |
Okay, here’s the second cute story and, then, we’ll move on. The Inn is a beautiful fire hazard. Danger Will Robinson, danger! Why do I start off with that? Did I say it just to scare you? No, it was simply to make sure you’re awake. You have to picture this. I’m sure you’ve seen log cabins and, yes, you’re aware that they’re pretty much all made of wood. In this case, it’s more than that. The wood is exquisite and, well, for lack of repetition, beautiful. So when you walk into the building, you not only notice that it’s all wood, but the wood is incredible. It stands out. It seems to say, "I’m made of beautiful wood and you’re going to be mesmerized by me." In fact, it is so incredibly beautiful that you have the urge to touch it (which I secretly did). It’s as beautiful as the most beautiful girl in your high school class who was so beautiful that she knew it and flaunted it.
This is David’s pride and joy and with good reason. The living room alone was so beautiful I could easily say it was a room that I could happily spend several days without leaving. Of course, David might get upset about a man living in the living room of his Inn without bathing for a few days, but it is that beautiful.
The entire house is like that. I mean, even the damn toilet was beautiful. He actually has a toilet that he says is a few hundred years old and it looks it. However, not old like one of Margherita’s Sicilian aunts who is old and certainly looks her age, but old like Sophia Loren. Yes, old and pretty. Okay, that Sophia Loren metaphor doesn’t go with the toilet, but this damn toilet with the elephant feet was killing me, as it was so beautiful.
I should also mention that I used the word beautiful 11 times in describing the Magnolia Springs Bed & Breakfast. I could have gone back and used the handy thesaurus to stop the repetition, but I feel that, yes, the Magnolia Springs Bed & Breakfast is 11 times more beautiful than the word beautiful implies on it’s own.
Well, you get the idea.
After Magnolia Springs, it was back in the car and, then, off to dinner. Here we were at Calypso Joe’s Caribbean Grille, which makes one suddenly get the urge to play Jimmy Buffet songs. Margherita was dancing when they played "Margaritaville," which simply reinforced that feeling.
Anyway, we sat on the open deck, ate oysters and looked out at the sunset. We recouped our energy.
Why? Tonight we were going to the one club to which I have dreamed of going since my teenage years. I’ve heard rumors about it, but tonight that fiction was going to crash with reality. Tonight we were going to Floribama.
Floribama simply is a very accurate name. It’s a bar located on the border of Florida and Alabama. That’s the gimmick, that’s the premise. What I heard about it was that everybody loved the fact that you could drink in two states at once. I also heard that they played down-home music from Lynyrd Skynyrd and other southern rock bands.
The first part about the state line wasn’t entirely true. There was a state line dividing the place and there might have been an actual line that you can stand on, but this line was now covered by a crowd close to the population of New York City. There were people near people, there were people close to people, and there were people on top of people. It was like looking at a Where’s Waldo book with the absence of Waldo.
Then one has to describe the people themselves. Yes, a majority of them clearly were southerners and proud of it. Quite a few of them were ready to scream out a request for "Free Bird," but the social extremes were startling. On one side of me was a woman no younger than 65 years old, dancing the jig while a bachelorette party was playing some corny game and, over in the far corner, was a mother who had her young, but overage daughter with her. They were both drinking and dancing with a biker and a man in a suit. This was Floribama. We sat on a deck, above the madness and just absorbed it all in.
"There’s Waldo." I said to Margherita while pointing towards the crowd. She started looking for Waldo, which simply diluted the joke.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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