Alabama

Mobile, Alabama is "a thing," right? We certainly thought it was. But this was one of those cities where, once again, we found ourselves struggling to find a reason to be there. We sat down at a Starbucks and furiously... touched, rubbed, caressed, molested.... is there a word for the way one interacts with an iPhone? Well either way, we looked to our phones for answers and found nothing. We had seen road signs pointing to a place called Dauphin Island earlier, so we thought we'd partake in the Alabama Gulf coastline's latest tourist attraction: tar-ball season.


We got down to the area and took one of those long beachy drives down a road with sand dunes and houses propped up high on pylons that we've grown so accustomed to. The place was in a weird state of transition with bulldozers moving sand around and very few other cars like ours on the road. We kept driving until the road ended and we found ourselves among a gaggle of CNN news trucks. We were soon approached on the passenger side by a young man asking to see our "badges."

"Oh, we don't have badges, we're just... driving."

"Well, what did you come down here to see?"

"Uhhhhh, we're not sure, why don't you tell us what we came down here to see?"


We were told we couldn't be there and were forced to drive back. Apparently, a police officer was on a break or something, because we missed a check point a few miles ago where we would have been turned around. Everything felt very strange, like we stumbled upon some sort of secret government operation.


We stopped at a section of the beach that was inexplicably open which we'd passed on earlier. The beach was huuuuge, so we made the long oppressingly hot walk from the parking lot to the lapping shoreline where we found...


OIL! I really didn't think we'd ever see anything, we'd missed it by a few days in Pensacola apparently, but there it was just at the water's edge, tiny little blobs of brown oil glistening in the Alabama sun. They could easily go unnoticed, looking like some sort of unfamiliar seaweed, but there were crews of people carefully shoveling each tiny blob out of the sand and dumping it into garbage bags.


We were confused, however, to learn that this was definitely not tipping off the locals to the situation because they still seemed to be completely ok with taking a dip in their jorts. Hmm. As we stared at the tar balls, stunned, exchanging incredulous glances with another amazed woman, said local in jorts approached us to proudly show off the dollar bill he'd just found floating in the water. Ok. Well, I suppose if we let this oil thing get to us then the terrorists win... right?


Our shoes stained by tar balls and our consciences pleading with us to go back and clean some pelicans (shut up conscience, those pelicans will NEVER thank us!), we left the beach, got some shaved ice, saw a trademark-infringing run down shack, took a photo of a big ol' pile of oyster shells and moved on to Mississippi.


Michelle looks cranky because the teenagers working inside this place were super cranks.