The quirky views of coastal Alabama
Ships, cars and planes provide three perspectives of rebellious Gulf Shores and Orange Beach
GULF SHORES & ORANGE BEACH, ALA.— To enter Souvenir City on Perdido Beach Blvd., steel yourself to walk through the menacing open jaws of a shark.
Granted, you can see a very normal row of newspaper boxes under the shark’s pearly whites, plus grinning tourists taking selfies, but allow yourself a split second of retail fear.
Who knows what lurks inside this 61-year-old family-run shop? Kitsch galore — the kind of stuff that tempts you to spend recklessly — but also oddities such as a bloody red door with holes drilled into it and a sign that warns: “Only children allowed to look into shark’s stomach.”
I’ll let you experience the shark’s stomach for yourself, but will say that I spent a fair bit of time and money inside Souvenir City with Zoltar, an animatronic fortune telling machine, who advised that “you change your sky, not your mind, when you cross the sea or land.”
Zoltar also somehow knew that a “busy idleness possesses me” and that I seek a happy life with ships, cars and planes. I bet he tells that to all the tourists, but I did, in fact, do those very things while exploring the neighbouring beach communities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach.
My “ship” was a 24-foot pontoon boat named Skip’s Trips with Sailaway Charters, and Captain Skip (John Beebe) had us busting our guts with a safety briefing that had us picking duties for a “man overboard” situation (although nobody has ever fallen overboard in his 19 years leading tours).
We went out on Wolf Bay and marvelled at dolphins and pulled up a shrimp net to ogle the catch (shrimp, stingrays, jellyfish and sea walnuts).
We sent the entire catch back in the water and made it back to shore without incident, so I never got to be the one to jump into the water and save a man/ woman overboard.
My “car” experience, if Zoltar is OK with a loose definition of motorized vehicle, was a Segway outing with Coastal Segway Adventures.
James Yaskowich, a Saskatchewan native who told us this part of Alabama is Snowbird central, gave us safety lessons and ordered us to tool around a parking lot before taking off through Gulf State Park.
Let’s just say that driving a Segway is harder than it looks and I might have cried like I girl when I took a wicked tumble on a bridge. But I climbed back on and stuck with the group, albeit at a fairly slow and cautious speed.
Just remember Yaskowich’s pearls of Segway wisdom: “Be one with the machine, or be off the machine.”
My “plane” experience, Zoltar will be pleased to know, was actually a helicopter ride over Alabama’s sugar sand beaches with Orange Beach Helicopters.
“It’s only my second day on the job,” pilot Corey Wallace joked. “But I read the book two times.” I scored the seat beside him and was a little thrown by the fact the chopper doors were missing.
“No matter how hard I turn this thing, you will not fall out,” Wallace promised, launching into a complex explanation about aerodynamics. When he eventually added that the door removal was “poor man’s air conditioner,” I calmed down.
Alabama, you see, is a little bit flip, proudly rebellious and quirky as all get out.
Jennifer Bain was hosted by Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism, which didn’t review or approve this story.