And every night I ate seafood fresh from the nearby Gulf of Mexico.
The Science Center is in Mobile, on Alabama's Gulf Coast. Five Rivers and Bellingrath are a half-hour's drive away. Seafood is served in most sit-down restaurants in and near this interesting Deep South port city.
Mobile (pronounced moe-BEEL) would make a dandy stopover for snowbirds looking for a sidetrip. Pensacola, Fla., is an hour east, the casinos of Biloxi, Miss., an hour west, and New Orleans 90 minutes past Biloxi.
Co-founded by Canadian-born Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, Mobile's history includes the dark days of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan, the festiveness of the New World's first-ever Mardi Gras (Feb. 16 this year), and World War II boom times when the shipbuilding yards turned out one Liberty ship per week and Mobile was the fastest-growing city in America.
Back to the present.
Simulated surgery, guided by computers, can be done in the Science Center's newest permanent exhibit, My Bodyworks. It's in an area named for Ernest G. DeBakey, a local surgeon and brother of world-renowned cardiovascular surgeon Michael E. DeBakey. (See exploreum.net.)
Those white pelicans were viewed from a small boat at the gateway to more than 100,000 hectares of waterways, woods and wetlands. Five Rivers is on the Mobile-Tensaw River delta, the second largest system of that type in the continental U.S. Boat tours are run five times a week, year round, and guided canoe and kayak safaris are organized. There's also a canoe trail and floating campsites that can be rented. (Visit Alabama5rivers.com.)
Twenty-six-hectare Bellingrath Gardens is another oasis of calm. Cascading chrysanthemums were at their peak when I visited. A bonus was finding more than 75 varieties of roses. I'm told the azealas are stunning in March. Cellphones can be used to take an audio tour. (Visit bellingrath.org.)
Alligator Alley sounded hokey but wasn't. It's a home for rescued gators, ones that ate someone's pet or were just hanging around where they weren't wanted. They would have been executed had they not been taken in.
About 170 wild gators inhabit a cypress swamp, 30 more hatched on site are in pens. The most notorious inhabitant is Captain Crunch. A Florida university professor who tested gators to determine the force of their bite found Crunch's was 1,353 kilos, nearly 50% above the norm.
Gators like it warm, so if you're down there between October and February, phone first, 251-946-2483, to see if they're open. Alligator Alley is a half-hour from downtown. (Visit gatoralleyfarm.com.)
A major Mobile attraction is Battleship Memorial Park, where you can walk the deck of the USS Alabama, a World War II battleship, or go below in a submarine. (Visitussalabama.com.)
Tourism information, visit mobilebay.org or phone 1-800-5-MOBILE.
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