Beach Escape.

A weekend along Alabama’s Gulf Coast will clear your mind and get you right with your world again. Some places you need to check out:


Stay:



The Wharf. Want to stay and play in one location? If driving isn’t high on your priorities, you might consider a weekend or a week at The Wharf. This mixed use development along Wolf Bay isn’t just a place to go or a place to stay. It’s a place to play, swim, eat, golf, and shop. Rent a condo for two or twelve people in one of The Wharf’s high-rises. Shop for designer anything at the retail shops that line Main Street. Dine at one of the many restaurants, swim at The Oasis, an exclusive water park just for guests. Go hear a concert at the 10,000 seat amphitheater, or ride on the tallest Ferris wheel along the Gulf Coast.

Live Bait at The Wharf is a great place to dine while you’re there. An extraordinarily seafood-heavy menu is paired with a sushi bar of all things. The Seafood Nachos are legendary; or go for decadent and share a Steamed Seafood Platter with a friend (or don’t share and enjoy it all yourself!).

The Wharf * 4550 Main Drive in Orange Beach * thewharfal.com


The Beach Club. Upscale and luxurious, this kicked back oasis along the Gulf of Mexico has its own private beach, a wide variety of accommodations and several on-site restaurants that serve up a variety of foods. Don’t want sand in your shoes from the beach? There are five outdoor pools and an indoor one, too, along with hot tubs and cabanas. A full service spa, tennis courts, clubhouse and more can make wanting to leave pretty tough.

The Beach Club * Beach Club Trail in Gulf Shores * beachclubal.com



Beach Houses. Not the pampered sort? If you want to enjoy the breezes off the Gulf from the privacy of your own beach house, you’re in luck. Kaiser Realty offers beach house and condominium rentals all along Orange Beach and Gulf Shores. Take the family or your friends and enjoy a place all to your own. Amenities such as beach and pool access, large kitchens, group-style accommodations and more are available. Check them out.

Kaiser Realty * 1557 Gulf Shores Parkway * kaiserrealty.com


Learn:


Sailaway Charters. Join Captain Skip on a tour of Wolf Bay and its estuaries and learn all about shrimping, crabbing and oyster harvesting. His boat trips into the bay feature a hands on close-up look at native birds, fish, oysters and other wildlife. If you’re lucky, Skip’s dolphin friend Mr. Friendly might come up alongside the boat for a visit. A must-do activity, especially for families.


Sailaway Charters * 24231 Gulf Bay Road * sailorskip.com






Fort Morgan. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” The phrase comes from the Battle of Mobile (date cite). Fort Morgan is one of three forts in the area (Fort Gaines on Dauphin Island and the recreated Fort Conde in Mobile) and by far the largest.

Military buffs will enjoy the museum and its comprehensive information about the Fort’s service since its 1834 construction -- with photographs and exhibits from the fort’s service in the Civil War and onwards.

Kids will get a kick out of being able to crawl all over a living, breathing piece of American history.


Fort Morgan * 110 Highway 180 West
* http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/
wwwlps/lessons/73morgan/73morgan.htm



Blow it up. Does art fascinate you? The Orange Beach Art Center isn’t just a place to look at art, it’s a place to create it. Featuring Alabama’s only public access glass studio, the Center hosts all sorts of hands-on classes and demonstrations that will fit any budget. If you’ve ever been interested in glassblowing, this is the place to get your gear on and create your own 2200 degree art.


Orange Beach Art Center * 26389 Canal Road * orangebeachartcenter.com




Romantic getaway. Pack a picnic basket (you can pick up supplies at Bruno‘s or Publix, two of the local grocery stores) and head to Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge. Take the Pine Beach trail out to a secluded and remote section of beach where no one will bother you but the gulls (and other hikers). It’s a hearty two mile walk that takes you through lush pine forest and swampland, past 40 acre Gator Lake and over sand dunes right down to the beach. Watch for birds such as the Yellow-Rumpled Warbler and the Red-Eyed Visio, and stick to the beach area trails -- this is a nesting area for the Snowy Plover.


Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge * Highway 180 West of Gulf Shores * www.fws.gov/bonsecour


Dine:

Alabamans love their Royal Red shrimp, and one of the best places to find them is at a little place called King Neptune’s. Al and Diane Sawyer’s place may not look like much from the outside, but the eatery often has a line out the door full of hungry patrons looking for good, reasonably priced seafood. Royal Reds come by the half-pound or pound. Other great Gulf Coast specialties can be found here, such as West Indies Salad, fried crab claws and a variety of broiled and fried seafood platters. If you skip the Fried Cheesecake, you’re doing yourself a disservice, best fried cheesecake I’ve ever had. But if you want to share with a small army, go for the bread pudding. It’s huge.

King Neptune’s * 1137 Gulf Shores Parkway * kingneptuneseafoodrestaurant.com


A destination all its own, especially for Parrotheads: Lulu’s at Homeport Marina is one of those great places where you can have a Cheeseburger in Paradise, walk barefoot in the sand, tie up your boat for a while and do a little bit of nothing.

It’s run by Lucy Anne Buffett, the effervescent sister of Jimmy, who‘s likely to be passing through when you drop by. The restaurant itself is huge (I was told they’ve seated up to 3000 people at once) and the living is easy. There are sand and play areas for the kids, beach chairs and tunes for the adults, and a sandwich heavy menu for all.

Try the Mahi Tacos, and if you don’t get a Big Blue Shark Margarita, it could be your fault.

Lulu’s at the Homeport * 200 East 25th Avenue in Gulf Shores * lulusathomeport.com






Looking for a tasty yet unusual dining experience? Cosmo’s is where you should land. Yes, there are a lot of the traditional Gulf Coast specialties on hand. But you’re going to want to try some of the more unusual items. Such as rolls from the on-duty sushi chef, who comes up with such items as the Duck Roll (smoked duck, red bell peppers, green pepper jelly and cream cheese).

The banana-wrapped fish is decadent, and the cheese dip is unlike any cheese dip you’ve ever had.

Cosmo’s * 25753 Canal in Orange Beach * cosmosrestaurantandbar.com






Best place to be a beach bum? Try The Hangout at Beach Boulevard and Alabama Highway 59. This revived 50’s and 60’s style restaurant firmly grasps its beach bum heritage with plenty of cold drinks, hot food and fun activities. Add in a courtyard full of fun activities, live music, shopping and a nice stretch of Gulf Coast beach, and you have yourself a dining destination. The Wipeout Burger, if you dare try it, is the quintessential Alabama beach burger.

The Hangout * 101 East Beach Blvd. * thehangoutal.com

What in the world is all this travel for?

I get a lot of questions posted to me by email and Facebook and Twitter (and sometimes even in person). But one I don’t get very often is the one posted above. After all, what is my raison d’etre for getting out and going and doing these things?

The simplest answer is that I have an incurable sense of wanderlust. When I was in my early 20s this manifested itself in a need to move house about once every six months to a year… we moved 10 times in 8 years around Arkansas. When we landed here at our house in Little Rock, we decided we were done with that. Since that decision in 2001, we’ve tended to take weekends seriously and go explore wherever we could reach by car, sort of a method of therapy from the news business.

Then I left the TV station and started doing this. Well, it was never as simple as that. I started writing this blog when I left the station and I found I enjoyed just going out on a drive and finding something to document (see A Block of Malvern for a good example). Then there was that first magazine that wanted me to do travelogues. Suddenly I find myself taking planes to destinations here and there and hopping around the U.S. And that was thrilling, but two things grounded me -- (a) I wasn’t really getting paid enough to cover that sort of travel and make a living (at the time), and (b) I got pregnant. The latter was a lovely planned thing but it did take me off the road for a while.

In December 2008 our daughter Hunter arrived, and that certainly turned my world over. It took a lot to even dream of leaving her behind for the slightest bit of time, so she traveled with me (thanks to help from my mom and my husband), and we started crossing the borders again.

Well, she’s 17 months old now, and somehow I manage to convince myself that I should go travel again -- now it really is a monetary issue, with newspapers and magazines paying me decent contracts for my work. It’s always hard, but I’m comforted by the fact that most people have to leave their kids for eight to ten hours a day to go to work. For me, it’s a couple of days a month. When I’m in-state, she’s usually with me, and when I’m at home I write around her schedule.

That does get me away from what I was going to talk about -- which is why I travel and why I share those travels. Frankly, I like to tell a good story -- and there are tons of good stories out there, in places and things and people. I tend to lean hard towards food-related stories, because there’s nothing more intimate in this world (on a wide-scale basis) than the sharing of meals. Food is the universal language that transcends politics, religion and even bad accents. It’s something that can be celebrated.

Now you may have noticed that this website’s received a bit of rearrangement lately. I wanted to be able to share more of what I do and who I do it with -- hence the links in the right hand column. Scroll down and you’ll discover other bloggers who are featured through Lonely Planet, people who have really gotten out in the world and done something with their travels. With these chronicles, you can share a more intimate experience of their world and perhaps learn a bit about yours.

See, this world travel is something not everyone has the opportunity to do. But you can experience it right from your own computer, right now. And really, how cool is that?

There is an easier way to experience those world travels, though. We're all gathered together, all us Lonely Planet bloggers, at Squidoo. So click through and wander the world. Me? I'm on the bottom. My travels far a-field are still limited to where I can get in the states... for now.

Seafood Dive in Gulf Shores - King Neptune's.

Finding seafood along the Alabama Gulf Coast isn’t hard. I ate at seven restaurants over four days and all seven of them had crab claws and Key Lime Pie. Including this one that really stood out. King Neptune’s is a small place buffeted by another seafood joint and a realty office, across the street from yet another seafood place and a doughnut shop. The signs are modest, the exterior reminiscent of a 50s style drive-in. But inside you’re going to find some of the best seafood in Gulf Shores.

The restaurant, started 17 years ago by proprietors Al and Diane Sawyer (not THAT Diane Sawyer) celebrates the fruit of the Gulf by featuring and serving up only locally harvested shrimp on its menu. The staff does that in an unpretentious, relaxed atmosphere. You can put your elbows on the table here and no one’s going to mind.

Went with a group on the first day of May… I’d been told great stories about the place, and was looking forward to that first taste of Royal Red shrimp I’d been waiting for. But before that, there were appetizers.

The first -- the West Indies Salad ($11.99), is something I’ve only found in lower Alabama. It’s a marinated salad of lump crabmeat, Vidalia onions, vinegar and oil, and it’s served up with a basket of crackers. Perhaps it’s my southern Arkansas upbringing, but my first inclination was to have a bite spread out on a club cracker. It’s a little astringent but also sweet from the crab and the onion. King Neptune’s version comes out in a large, perfect scoop, lightly peppered on a bed of lettuce with lemon if you want it.

Then came the Fried Green Tomatoes and Shrimp ($7.99). Both are liberally breaded with cornmeal. The shrimp are on the savory side, nice firm morsels that bounce back a little to the bite. The tomatoes are about a quarter inch thick, just thick enough to hold their consistency and stand up to a fork, but the ones we got were a bit tart. The house cocktail sauce is fine, though I found the remoulade to be a little too spicy for my taste.

Tony Sawyer sat down with us for a few minutes while we were enjoying the first couple of appetizers. He says his dad has a ten inch thick cookbook of the recipes they use in the restaurant in the back. His favorite items on the menu are the West Indies Salad and the Seafood Burrito, though he says he eats just about everything they have to offer. He also told us the hours tend to vary at the restaurant -- they always open at eleven in the morning, but in the winter they close at eight, in the spring and fall at nine and during the summer at ten. He mentioned there are regulars who come by, and sometimes they’re met at the door with their usual beverage. He also mentioned that diners lined up out the door on a daily basis. It was just a few minutes past eleven, so I had no evidence of that yet. I figured I’d wait and see if he was right.

The next round of shared appetizers came out. The Fried Crab Claws ($17.99) were a sizeable plate -- I’m estimating a pound’s worth, and meaty. The breading was light and there was enough meat on the claws to make them worthwhile. They were nice and fat and a good mouthful.

Tony talked with us a bit longer, telling us how his dad learned to cook seafood from his aunts, and that his dad got his culinary leanings from his Italian mother, who came out of Brooklyn. Tony himself is very involved in the family business, but when he’s free from the store he likes to fish and hunt and be out on the water.

Al himself came by and made an appearance, checking on us. We all tried to talk him into a restaurant cookbook that could be sold to consumers. He looked interested. We’ll see where that goes.

We’d requested an order of steamed Royal Reds ($13.99 half pound, $19.99 pound if ordered in a meal) to share, and they came to the table, a half pound’s worth. There weren’t very many of them, but that was okay -- they were big, the largest of the mess a good five inches long and very fat. We passed them around, each of us taking one to try. Being a Southern girl, it was nothing for me to pop it open like a crawfish, snapping the head and using my thumb to cut down the inside and pull off the legs and shell. I deveined it with a butter knife and gave it a try. I’d been skeptical up to that point, since I couldn’t tell much difference in flavor between a brown or pink shrimp. But this? It was different. The meat has a more, dare I say, meaty texture, more like lobster than shrimp. It’s more savory, too. And somehow, it manages to keep the sweet of shrimp. Now I understand why they’re so highly prized.

We decided to share a dozen raw oysters ($6.50 a dozen). They were big. I don’t know if perhaps we got them on a good day or what, but those were some of the largest I’ve ever seen on the half shell. They were served up with cocktail sauce and horseradish, but I like mine straight up -- straight out of the shell. Other tablemates had theirs on crackers with a little horseradish and such.

The coleslaw for my dinner was brought over in advance of the platter. It was peppery and small-cut.

And then came the platter itself. I’d gone for the Broiled Combination Seafood Platter ($19.99), a selection of shrimp, scallops, oysters and a filet of flounder baked in the oven and served with corn and potatoes. The baked together mess (and I say that as in a lot of things cooked together, not that it was messy) blended well in a buttery sort of way, with a very light crown of spices and a lemon slice on top. I don’t care for flounder most of the time, but this was decadently light fish that didn’t resemble what I’d been served up here in Arkansas. It was nice and neat fish, and if I knew that’s what I’d get when I ordered all the time I’d eat more flounder.

The nicely cut scallops were at their perfect firmness. The shrimp were good, though I secretly wished the Royal Reds had come in this dish instead of pink. The oysters had taken on a good amount of that buttery flavor and were still pretty soft.

But the star of this show to me was the most unheralded bit of the plate -- a three inch chunky crab cake tucked down on the side of the platter. It was sweet and bready without having a whole lot of breading in it, with little bits of red and green bell pepper in it. It was both crispy and moist, and deserved its own special recognition. Damn fine crab cake.

One of my traveling companions had ordered up the same thing, but with the additional fried soft shell crab. I just had to take a photo.

I also sampled one of the house hush puppies, just for the heck of it. Theirs come sweet and corny with a good bit of jalapeno in them. Nice. I wonder if the sweetness is an Alabama trait or just how ol’ Al learned how to make them.

Well, you just can’t take me anywhere without me at least sampling a dessert, especially with a crowd to share with. We decided between the six of us to try all three of the house desserts. This may have been a mistake at the waistline but it was a great decision for the taste buds.

I have to start off with what is the best Fried Cheesecake ($5.99) I have ever tried. I’ve had bad fried cheesecake at the State Fair before… where the center was still frozen and the strange corndog-type batter was thick. This no more resembled that than my arm resembles a fire hose. It’s a lovely creamy cheesecake, something that’s definitely local-made and not off the back of a Sysco truck. The coating is cornflake-based, very crispy and crunchy. Over that is a praline sauce dotted with chopped pecans. It’s been a few days since my experience but I can still smell the sweetness and the nuttiness of the cheesecake in my mind. We argued over the last bite.

We also had to try the Key Lime Pie ($4.50), and I was quite pleased with the balance of sweet and tart. It’s very creamy and very yellow. A winner.

But then… then there was the dessert that about defeated us all. The Bread Pudding ($4.50) is massive, a mountain of bready custardy goodness served up on a dinner plate. Like all good bread puddings, it’s a nice variety of textures. It’s obviously a French bread style pudding, with notes of vanilla and banana throughout. It’s served up with a whiskey sauce that’s almost kid-safe, warm but not burning. And it seemed to be about as big as my head. Of all the desserts, it’s the only one that we had to leave bits behind. As it was, wheelbarrow reinforcements were considered.

It was about that point I noticed the line. There were a few people standing just inside the doorway, and another dozen right outside the door. With much more to do for the day and a little guilt for holding up the table space, we managed to get upright again and departed.

King Neptune’s is located a couple of blocks south of the Fort Morgan Highway on the Gulf Shores Parkway. I highly recommend a stop in if you’re craving seafood. You can also call them at (251) 968-5464 or check out their pretty good website.