| We left New Orleans on the 17th and headed east on the I10 out of
Louisiana and into Mississippi. It was a miserable day with miserable sights
of devastation all along the Mississippi coast. That is documented on
another page. We did get some brighter sights along the way but not many.
One was this giant guitar advertising a Hard Rock Casino. Presumably
it is connected to the chain. This is in Biloxi and sheltered from the
worst of the hurricane by the hotel and casino blocks between it and the
sea. Didn't stop the raindrops on our windscreen though. |  |
 |
From Biloxi we could not follow the US90 any more because of the damaged
bridges. We had to head back inland to the I10 before leaving Mississippi
and entering Alabama. This is the skyline of Mobile. Rather surprisingly the
road goes UNDER the river here in a tunnel, I wonder how they stop it
flooding? |
| Out the other side and we passed this Phantom perched on a pole.
Not a result of a hurricane but quite a common site near any sort of
Veteran's park or memorial. They obviously had a load of surplus aircraft
after Vietnam. They aren't all in Arizona. |  |
 | But not everywhere
has a spare battleship tied up. This is the USS Alabama (surprise) now
permanently moored in Mobile Bay. We didn't visit but it may well have still
been closed because it was damaged in the hurricane and closed for a long
time. We missed the turning and you could not easily go back. Besides it was
getting late. |
| The roads cross the bay on a 5-6 mile bridge. One carries the
Interstate and the other the US98 which we had taken to head back to the
coast. |  |
 | It was quite a trek
back to the coast and very slow going. We took the coast route through the
towns of Daphne and Fairhope where we spotted this flower bed. It had stopped
raining but was still quite miserable and cold, and these spring flowers
helped cheer us up. After the depression of
Mississippi, this part of Alabama seems much wealthier with significantly better
housing stock (and correspondingly more capable of coping with extremes of
weather), but coastal areas are always popular for holiday homes. I suspect
that the rest of the state is not as wealthy, but we don't have time to
explore this now. |
| We camped at a site on the coast at a place called Gulf Shores.
This is next door to Orange Beach. The beach itself goes on for miles and
is a pure white quartz structure. Mississippi has nothing on the coast
left. Alabama has recovered a lot from Camille a few years ago and didn't
appear to have suffered as much from last year's hurricanes. It is
now building hotel and condominium complexes on every inch of its coastline. The
bottom two floors have nothing in them, to cater for the storm surge. It is to be
hoped they are building solidly because Katrina and Rita just blew out all the
windows in structures like this. |  |
 | Of course if your
house isn't high enough, or is in the wrong place, then you just move it. It
is to be hoped the foundations of this one are better when they decide where
to put it. The beach was just behind us at this point. |
| These beachfront properties had survived rather better but I
suppose they were on the fringes. We are now over 100 miles from New
Orleans. Having said that, most of these had some damage, usually windows
blown out, so I guess they had significant internal damage as well. They didn't look
lived in. |  |
 | After a couple of days we
continued on into the Florida panhandle, passing along the coast to the
south of Pensacola. There is the Naval Air Museum there but we felt we had
seen enough aircraft for the time being. It
is also the home of the Blue Angels, the American Navy's display team. From Pensacola
the road turns south, crossing the bay on another long causeway bridge, seen
here vanishing into the sea mist. |
| The coast is very sandy, and with the white sand we had seen in
Alabama. It is more protected here because there are sandbar islands just
off the coast which break the force of the storms and reduce the erosion and
damage. So the mainland develops dunes covered in salt tolerant grasses. |  |
 | There is much less
habitation in this area with just the occasional marina. We travelled over
the bridge and along Santa Rosa Island through Destin and several other
coastal towns. |
| It really was this misty. In fact with the colour of the sand it
was difficult to see anything. Here we have sea, sand, and condominiums at
Destin, but it was very hard to see. |  |
 | But the weather did
clear up although we missed the actual sunset. This was at Mexico Beach, a
nondescript town on the coast just south of Panama City, which isn't much
better, all about 200 miles south west of Mobile. |
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