The weather has gone from hot and muggy with tornado warnings on Saturday to cool and windy temperatures on Sunday to beautiful sunshine and a clear blue sky with a 23°C (73°F)dry high today. Because of the change in weather we decided to take the motorcycle and tour some of Alabama’s Gulf coast.

Last night we wanted to go out for seafood and using our GPS system we located a restaurant nearer the RV Park than Pensacola. After dinner, we went for a drive and discovered beautiful farmlands, communities and villages all around us and decided we would explore them today. We are staying in Alabama but we are only 20 miles from Florida and for some reason we thought we would be doing all our explorations in the Pensacola area.

We were pleasantly surprised to find a less “depressed”, cleaner, version of coastline on the Gulf of Mexico in places like Gulf Shores, Palmetto Beach and Fort Morgan. I just had no idea that there was more to Alabama than southern accents, black-eyed peas and deep fried everything. Who knew I was so ignorant? The Alabama coast is beautiful but also susceptible to the wrath of hurricanes and like Pensacola, was subjected to a great deal of damage in 2004 and 5.

Even though hurricane season runs from June to November, with the vast amount of rental properties along the beaches, this area is a popular destination. Evidently there is a spring break here now because there were dozens of students everywhere enjoying the beaches and restaurants. We hiked onto one of the deserted areas of the beach which was littered with millions of broken seashells and took pictures of the coastline.

On a sadder note, we send our sincerest condolences to the families and friends of the shooting victims from today’s horrific massacre at the Virginia Tech college campus this morning. It saddens me to think that someone would be so desperate that they would go on a shooting rampage and kill so many young, innocent people. I suppose if guns weren’t so readily available these things wouldn’t happen but unfortunately, there’s nothing that can be done about that now.