Florida!

February 4th: We leave Louisiana (again) on the I12, passing north of New Orleans, rejoining the I10 just before crossing into Mississippi (again). The weather continues to be sunny and mild during the days, with temperatures close to freezing most nights. We are pushing to get into Florida and start to enjoy warmer weather. However, the latest forecasts are for freezing overnight temperatures in Florida as well! At least for the next 3-4 days. And… we now discover that the shuttle launch, scheduled for February 12th, is now having problems and will likely get delayed by a week. Well, that’s a bummer, especially if it gets delayed further and we have to head back west without seeing it.
Aha! Maybe an opportunity to get down to southern Florida, and pay a visit to Key West and Alligator Alley! And the trip to the Space Center is always wonderful, with or without launches.
Anyway, today we travel across Mississippi and Alabama and arrive in Florida. The photo is of the skyline of Mobile, Alabama as we approach from the west. Mobile is at the head of a huge bay. Just east of the city is the USS Alabama, now open for public visits in the middle of a lovely bayshore park. We pass it as the highway rises onto a very long strand which runs over the eastern side of the bay. Crossing Alabama on the I10 is very fast - the state has a very narrow shoreline.

The first city in Florida is Pensacola, a big air military base, and home of the Blue Angels. The photo shows a retired Blue Angel on display at the Florida Information Center, just over the border from Alabama. Everything becomes very flat and the highway becomes a series of magnificent concrete spans, passing over inlets of the sea, parts of Pensacola Bay. We bid farewell to the I10 just east of Pensacola and head down to the coast road. We love this part of the Panhandle. There are wonderful barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico, which have excellent state parks for great camping, and by nightfall we are on St Andrews, just off Panama City. Anyone planning to come to Florida should consider this stretch of coast – it is all part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore – lots of protected natural beauty on the edge of the ocean. And really neat little towns. It is quite unlike how one thinks of Florida (Miami, Orlando, Sarasota, etc).
So here we are, at the other end of the country, 5000 miles behind us, and several weeks to spend hopefully in warm and sunny weather. The St Andrews campsite is part of the Florida state campgrounds. The road to it is about six miles off the coastal highway, onto the barrier island. The island runs several miles along the shore, to the east, across a lagoon (inlet of the sea) from Panama City. Our campsite is right on the lagoon shore, facing north to the city. We back in and have a wonderful view across a narrow sandy and grassy beach. As twilight falls, we sit and watch the lights coming on across the lagoon and begin to see the trees and beach around us thrown into high relief by the moon, riding high in a cloudless sky, heading west to set. Although campfires are allowed in this campsite, it’s just too cold, even for the Fishers!