I am determined to chronicle our family beach trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama, so I’m back-posting starting with Day 1, which consisted mostly of driving a van pulling our little fishing boat and a truck pulling our camper. Somehow, I managed to come out on the better end of that deal as I had our oldest, aka Curly, who is 16 now and a licensed driver, with me along with Li’l Bit and Li’l Bro. They barely made any sounds the entire trip, and Curly and I had some good convos on the way down PLUS he drove the entire trip down, which took us about 8 hours with lots of traffic late Saturday afternoon as we neared the beach.
When we got there, a cold front was crossing over the biggest part of the Southeastern United States including Gulf Shores, so it was going to be a cold night down in the upper 40s. The boys might have gotten a bit chilly that first night in the tent, but after that it was never below 60 degrees at night.
The best surprise other than the FABULOUS campground we discovered at Gulf State Park was the alligator friends in the canal behind our campsite. Yes, they were in there just steps from our site, and it was actually fun to see them come out each evening at dusk to presumably find their dinner. Thankfully, they weren’t interested in eating any of us. If you look closely at the photos below, you can see just the top of the the head of what we figured was about a 4-foot-long gator based on the time we saw him/her surface more to check us out.
