Category: Alabama

  • Bayou La Batre AL

    June 22nd, 2006

    We have spent the entire day catching up on our blogs and getting the picture gallery sorted out. We still have a ways to go on that, as we have several hundred+ pictures to sort through, from two different cameras. We need to choose the best ones, give them captions, and organize them by date. It’s a big job! We then need to upload all our photos to the Google Picasa web gallery (we got accepted into their beta test which just started a few days ago). Evelyn can grab them from there and put them on our website. Bear with us while we catch up to ourselves on this one. I have referred in several places to the gallery of photos, but we haven’t gotten there quite yet. Give us a day or so, still.

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  • Bayou La Batre, AL; Mobile AL, and Biloxi MS

    June 21, 2006

    It was a great joy to sleep in today, although after riding for 6 straight days and then having a whirlwind day yesterday, I still feel like I could sleep for hours. I spent a quick hour working in the motel lobby on my presentation, and then we took off for Mobile Alabama, where I spoke for an hour to the Mobile RIG. What a great treat it was! It was a small group, but a great location and a nice room. The investors appeared to be pretty sophisticated, with some very experienced folks in the group. I very much enjoyed the opportunity to talk, and only wished I could have had more time to talk informally with them. It was an hour lunch, and most of them had to leave immediately after I spoke.

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  • Bayou La Batre AL, 19 miles, and Pensacola FL

    June 20, 2006

    We had such a fun easy ride today, with only one challenge – the bridge right outside the island. It’s a four-mile bridge, and reaches impressive heights, at least to a bicyclist who’s not at all fond of heights. I had to talk myself up this one –you can check out a distance view of it in our picture gallery. I just kept my eyes on the road, and put one foot after the other, and sure enough, Chelsea was soon calling me to stop and take pictures at the top. Alex was quite funny, driving next to me for a short ways, calling out encouragement. 🙂 There’s more evidence of hurricane damage here – it’s clear to see that there used to be roadside businesses here, but all that remains in some cases are just twisted timbers or foundations. You can see a great photo of a waterfront fixer-upper in our gallery.

    Bayou is an extremely small town, despite the fact that it seems to go on for a ways. The kids went out for food last night, and everything was completely closed down by 8:30 at night. The only excitement in town was the local Sonic drive-in, so that’s what we had for dinner at 9:30 pm. When Chelsea and I finished our miles today, we asked a local woman if there was any place to get breakfast, and she looked at us in near total disbelief, and said, “In Bayou?!” We couldn’t help but laugh…and she was right…we had our breakfast at Sonic!

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  • Bayou La Batre AL (actually to Dauphin Island; 30 miles plus a few miles on the ferry)

    June 19th, 2006

    Chelsea and I got a great early start today, and still had tail winds. What a treat! The terrain was as flat as could be and we sailed west right along the Perdido Key, headed up towards Gulf Shores, and then west again on Ft Morgan Parkway. We had beautiful views of ocean for the first part, and shaded roads for much of the way along the Parkway. The area along the Parkway just after Gulf Shores reminds us a lot of the sections of Florida we went through, but it suddenly changed again as we got closer to Fort Morgan. The style of houses changed to the stilt structures we had seen in Orange Beach, and we suddenly realized how close we were to water on both sides. Check out our photo gallery for the houses we saw.

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  • Orange Beach AL; 53 miles

    June 18th, 2006

    We reached a milestone! We are in Alabama! Florida is such a big state, that we had begun to feel like we would never get out of the state. But here we are in Orange Beach AL. The day was much tougher than we expected, especially after our “high” of yesterday. The traffic out of Milton was amazingly heavy, but we had been warned that one of the hurricanes took out a bridge on I-10, and that the traffic was being routed onto Hwy 90. That didn’t seem to account for all of it, however, as traffic was really heavy all day.

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