Monday, January 8 Boston to New Orleans to Mobile

We arrived after dark at our marina in Mobile Alabama after flying from Boston and driving from the New Orleans airport. Wandering Star was still floating (!) and the water was still running (I was worried about frozen pipes) but it was cold and damp. We heated up the salon and then our cabin with our space heater and went to bed early.

Tuesday, Jan 9, still in Turner Marine in Mobile

This was a day for settling in and sorting out next steps. We did laundry in the marina washers, walked around and met some new looper friends, exchanged our rental car, and enjoyed dinner with new friends on their 40 foot+ sail boat – nice.

The only rental car Enterprise had available yesterday was a bright yellow, low-slung Camero. Just the thing for retired folks! But we made do until we could trade it in today for a more comfortable model.

January 10, Wednesday

We needed to decide whether or not to restart our trip, given the forecast of colder weather coming in. First we need a relatively calm day to cross Mobile Bay, which is shallow and challenging in windy conditions. It looked like this would be the best day for at least a week to 10 days, but then the temperatures will be dropping to where it’s no fun to be boating outside during the day. Do we move ahead and hole up in a new location or stay in this more affordable marina for a while? We decided to stay put and travel by rental car until the weather improves.

So we took off to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay to the lovely town of Fairhope, where we enjoyed an interesting town with unique shops and history. The town was founded as a single tax colony with the goal that the land would be owned by shared corporation that provided 99-year leased land for homes. The plan worked well home owners and the town, but the town’s growth outside the original boundaries changed things after a while. The theories around land ownership are interesting and fair-minded and worth reading about (http://beautifulfairhope.com/about/fairhope-single-tax-colony/) . We toured their history museum, walked around the attractive town, visited the wharf and enjoyed a good lunch in town.

In the past, boats doing the loop would come to the Fairhope town marina, but it has since closed. We saw that there is another marina close to town, but don’t know much about it and we won’t need to another marina in the area when we start cruising again anyway.

Here’s a map of Mobile Bay. Our marina is on the west side (green dot) and Fairhope is on the east (red dot). When we begin traveling again we start on the bottom right going east near Oyster Bay purple dot.