As you are reading this, my wife, Danny, and I are returning from a wonderful 10-day excursion to the south Alabama beaches. One that also included a two-day stay in a quaint little cottage overlooking Mobile Bay, in the heart of Fairhope, Alabama.
It’s all thanks to modern technology and the internet, which I have a love/hate relationship with. I’ve loved it the last 10 days, though, because without it those last 10 days would not have been possible.
You see, with an office staff of two, me being one of the two, it would be impossible to go anywhere — even home — and still be able to get the newspaper laid out, to the printing press in McComb, back to the office in print form, to the post office for delivery, and then on to you at your home...hopefully... plus posted to our website www.sctonline.net. Impossible!
Portable computers, cellular telephones, e-mail, wi-fi connections, and a thing called an ftp site, among other technical contraptions, and a lot of hoping, praying and finger crossing, with a good bit of cussing in between, do indeed make it all possible.
Danny and I, along with daughter Rachel-Johanna, who joined us mid-trip this year, have been vacationing on the beach — in a beach house litterly on the beach just steps from the waves in Fort Morgan, Alabama for 22 years now. If you’ve never been there, give it a try, you’ll love it.
It is not crowded like the resort areas, although a good bit more crowded, and a heck of a lot more expensive, now than it was in 2000 when we first discovered this hidden treasure. That year we rented a little seafoam green house on stilts, with sand dunes, seaoats, and the roaring Gulf as our backyard...or front yard...it was kind of hard to tell which was which.
We rented the same little green house for several years and then time came that our little girl wanted to bring along four or five other little girls, so we moved next door to a pink house with a better layout for a host of little girls.
We finally determined that little house was a little too little as those little girls became pre-teens, then teens, so we soon moved up the beach a little further to a much bigger beach house to better accommodate us all.
Then, as all things do, all that fun came to an end when the teens, as teens do, decided they were too old to be hanging out with this old Mom and Pop and opted to go off in their own different directions. At that point the bigger beach house became way too big for two, so Mom and Pop started wandering the beach — literally wandering the beach — in search of the perfect little bitty beach house that would better accommodate the two of us.
And we found it.
We found the perfect little retro, one bedroom place still right on the beach with the seaoats, and the sand dunes, and the roaring Gulf as our front yard...or our backyard...it was still kind of hard to tell which was which. Perfect isn’t even a good enough adjective to describe it, even though the price continued to climb for a week of our time, year, after year, after year.
And then something almost as terrible as a kid growing too old to hang out with Mom and Pop happened in 2020 and it came by the name of Sally. Hurricane Sally. Sally wiped the most perfect little bitty beach house, right on the beach in Fort Morgan Alabama, right off the face of the earth and our search began all over again.
Last year we found a pretty nice place — considering perfection had been blown away — but the layout wasn’t exactly as inviting as pictures had led us to believe. Don’t get me wrong, it was great and the oats, and the dunes, and the Gulf and all of that were still in the same place/places.
So this year we moved again. We moved two doors down. Yes, just two doors down where we were all dancing, and singing, and having a party, all week long.
All three of us were together again since our little girl has now gotten old enough to not be too old to hang out with Mom and Pop, but more like old enough to enjoy hanging with Mom and Pop, otherwise known as grown. Yes, we were dancing and singing and having a party again, with the seaoats, and sand dunes, and the roaring Gulf as our backyard, or our front yard...it was kind of hard to tell which was which!
