March 15th - Pensacola, Florida day

I mentioned earlier about helping tear down a wall at the church we have attended down here. Below is a photo of maybe a third of the area where the wall used to be. There are still a few metal studs to be cut off. The sanctuary is on the other side of the plastic. We removed the drywall from the studs so that the studs could be salvaged.

It will be interesting to see if the guys have it open when we go to church tomorrow.

Thursday

After my morning walk (only 1.35 miles), and a shower, we headed out for Pascagoula, Mississippi. Our intention was to “kill two birds with one stone”, we were going to take the ferry across Mobile Bay on our way to Pascagoula.

From the campground it is an hours drive, 40 miles, to the ferry. The last 19 miles are on a peninsula. The only way to get off the peninsula is to take the ferry to Dauphine Island (Mobile) or turn around and go back the way you came. There was some interesting housing to check out along the road, but the ferry ride appears to be the only reason to make the drive, unless you happen to live out on the peninsula. When we finally got to the ferry we saw a phone number displayed. Kathy called the number and learned that the ferry was down for maintenance.

As soon as you start out the road on the peninsula there are numerous signs warning that it is a “toll road”, which I assume refers to the charge to take the ferry. It certainly seems like someone could have added a sign stating that the ferry was out of service before people drove all the way out there. We were not the only ones who were turning around and heading back.

We ended up doing a little more sightseeing along the Gulf and had lunch at a rather boring restaurant buffet. The weather was nice so we still had an enjoyable day.

Friday
During my morning walk (4.4 miles in 75 min) I noticed that quite a few people had garage sales going on. Later in the morning Kathy & I went walking and checked some of them out. I bought a used 26” flat screen TV for $35 and Kathy bought 2 bags full of paperback books. Right before noon we picked up the TV on our way to the Fairhope Arts & Crafts festival.

Fairhope is about 15 miles from us, and right on Mobile Bay. It is supposed to be quite an upscale community. We drove around quite a while before we finally found a parking place. It was at least 5 blocks from the start of the festival. They had stuff priced from 50 cents to thousands of dollars. I’m certainly not an art critic but it looked to me like about a quarter of the art being sold could have been done by middle school kids. We did see some interesting things, like the “udder” ketchup & mustard dispensers.

 

Kathy walked more Friday than she has in a year, there were a lot booths to check out at the festival, and that was after hitting the garage sales earlier in the morning. The food court didn’t have anything that interesting so on the way out we had lunch at a couple of different churches. They had boiled shrimp at the Methodist church, which is where we went for Kathy’s lunch.

 

The Lutheran church had German sausage dinners, which is were we went for my lunch. Kathy’s shrimp was great and my sausage, sauerkraut and some kind of rye bread was also good. I still can’t handle German potato salad.

 

Saturday

While I ate breakfast at the clubhouse I noticed that they were setting up for their own craft festival. One guy had some awesome woodworking pieces, nicer that almost everything we saw at Fairhope.

After breakfast I walked a single lap (1.35 miles) around the campground.

Around 10:30 we headed for Pensacola. We drove along the coast. It was interesting, but after driving up the west coast in northern CA, OR & WA it was a little boring.

When we neared the museum we saw what we thought was a seafood restaurant and stopped for lunch.

This was parked along the edge of the parking lot.

After we entered we learned that it was a fish market. It was an interesting place and we were glad we stopped. There was an incredible number of people buying fresh fish. There must have been 8 checkout lines, with long lines at each. The photo below shows about half the length of the display of fresh fish.

As we neared the museum Kathy noticed four Airstream trailers in a courtyard along the street. They make up a food court. One is being remodeled, one served BBQ, one served cheese dishes and the last one served Mexican. Kathy had a taco and I had a burrito. Her taco was good, my burrito was OK (I think that I am disappointed in most restaurant food because Kathy is such a good cook. The food at most restaurants just can't compare to what she makes.

We took a guided tour at the History Museum. The tour guide gave us a lesson on the history of Pensacola, which was interesting and led us though 3 houses that were built in the 1800's. There was a lot more to see at the museum and if we had went there earlier we would have went back for a second day. It was cool and misted rain most of today so after touring the houses we headed back home.

Another good day in Alabama.

Our current plan is to head for Tennessee Monday. It is supposed to be rainy Monday morning so that may delay our departure. I want to get the propane tank filled down here, so that will slow us down some.   It is about 500 miles from here to our place in Crossville. My guess is that we will spend about 9 hours on the road, plus stops. We may drive it in a day or we may take 2 days, we will see how things go once we are underway. That is a nice thing about being retired. We don't have a schedule that has to be kept.

May God bless you and yours.