Our first full day on the beach!
Today we woke up to dolphins splashing a few hundred yards off the beach! We took turns zooming in on them with a pair of binoculars. Some of us got lucky and saw them “up close” and some (like me) didn’t. Emmy did. Caelynn and Kinsley thought they did, they were convinced they did, but the odds they were reacting to anything beyond their own imaginations were low.
No matter. At that age, if you think you see dolphins, then for all practical purposes you see dolphins. Reality and imagination are effectively the same.
Beanie discovered that “the [downstairs] bathroom has a potty in it” and she made sure to tell everyone else about it, one person at a time. This tells me she has some concept of a bathroom without a potty (toilet) in it. It’s not always words that are befuddling; sometimes it’s the thought process behind the words that makes you wonder.
I split off from the rest of the family for most of the day. My plan was to get lunch, go to the gym to pre-excuse myself for a couple more days of overeating, check out a couple curiosities I noticed while scanning Google Maps, and do some grocery shopping.
Truckzilla and I set out for Gulf Shores at around 11:30am. The trip was uncharacteristically quick. I followed a lazy RV at twenty under the limit for a couple of miles but was able to ditch him with a fake “oops, I didn’t mean to turn here” maneuver in a convenient turn lane. I sold it well, it was fine.
My first stop was at Gourmet World Market for an Artisan Club baguette sandwich. It was fantastic and much more than I bargained for. I’m sure it more than accounted for the calories I’d burn at the gym a couple hours later. From there I was off to the former Navy Outlying Landing Field (“NOLF”) Wolf in Elberta.
I spotted the NOLFs while scrolling around in Google Maps. They are essentially fake airports used by the Navy for pilot training. They allow for activities like landing and taxi practice without the distractions that would be present at a functioning airport like Naval Air Station Whiting Field. Some are still in use, some have been closed.
One of the keys to happiness as an introvert is in taking interest in things that don’t appeal to anyone else. Derelict infrastructure is a big one for me. Abandoned airports draw me like a moth to flame. Nobody else cares about them. More often than not that means hours of wandering, imagining what once was, and soaking up silence while never crossing paths with another soul. Bliss.
To that end, I went to Wolf first because it appeared to be the most isolated and likely mothballed, with all three landing surfaces X’ed out. There is no ARFF facility which seems to be a characteristic of the NOLFs that are still active.
I found that Wolf is still maintained. The driveway was recently used and there was a Kubota with a pull-behind mower parked near the entry. The grounds were well kempt and the wind sock was not in tatters. This tells me it’s still used for something, so I didn’t hop the fence to look around. If I trespass on property that the Navy still cares about, do I end up in the brig? Do they put civilians in the brig? I didn’t really care to learn so I snapped a few photos from outside the fence and continued on my way.
My next stop was at NOLF Barin back in Foley. I wanted to see what a real, active NOLF looked like. It was roughly what one would expect: an airport with an ARFF garage but no control tower and no terminal. There was a T-6 Texan II practicing approaches to runway 15. Its activities were pretty distant from my vantage point, but it looked a lot like landing practice looks in the civilian world, just in a much faster aircraft.
After a couple circuits the plane departed, I’d assume for the associated Navy training facility at Whiting, and a formation of mowers started up and headed out toward the runway complex. One would assume that emergency readiness and facilities maintenance constitute the lion’s share of what occupies the time of people stationed here.
From Barin I headed back toward Gulf Shores. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary after that. I stopped at Anytime Fitness for a couple hours because a 1,500 calorie workout makes it totally fine to eat 8,000 calories of crap across the following couple days. I did some grocery shopping. It seems that grocery shopping is a daily activity on any vacation. You don’t get to the point where you have everything you need until it’s time to go home–and then you have a bunch of stuff left over.
I’d intended to rent a bike for the week while I was in town, but I was so thoroughly tired of navigating Truckzilla through a town whose traffic flow is based on U-turns that I couldn’t take anymore. Biking will work itself out some other way.
When I arrived back at the house the others were wrapping up a beach day. I heard something about a boogie board. Emmy was dealing with her first bout of sunburn in addition to the ear issues she picked up on our flight from Madison to Charlotte. Everybody was generally worn out.
It was a good first full day of vacation.