Day 5
April 5, 2023
With a nice day ahead of me and plenty of time, there were certainly a great deal of options. I could have stopped into the U.S.S. Alabama Battlefield Park. For my $25 fee, I could toured the battleship and the WWII submarine U.S.S. Drum. I decided to drive on. Besides, the park wasn't even open for the day yet.
Instead, I chose to stay on Hwy 90 and explore as I drove west. Based solely on a highway sign, the first stop of the day was the Grand Bay National Wildlife Refuge.
The refuge runs along the coast of of both Alabama and Mississippi and covers 32,000 acres of coastal land. From the park headquarters, there are two short trails to explore. The first thing I noticed were the multitude of nests in the towers for the power lines.
The first trail begins with a mushy walk through the grass and the woods.
As I was walking the bluejays were calling back and forth. How do I know it was bluejays? Easy, there really is an app for that. It's called BirdNET.
The trail would eventually loop back to a boardwalk to an overlook.
The second trail was another loop through an Oak Grove.
While I've been to the Mississippi gulf coast a few times, I had never visited Pascagoula. On the northern end of town, it's hard to miss the old Round Island Lighthouse.
Round Island is actually triangular in shape and sits off the coast of the city. The first lighthouse was built there in 1833. Twenty years later, it was found to be unsound and rebuilt. The lighthouse was knocked over by Hurricane Georges in 1998. Rebuilding had begun when Hurricane Katrina blew through in 2005. Instead, the city decided to salvage as much of the original material as possible and rebuild it inland in a city park.
The roadtrip craving for coffee was kicking in and it brought me to an interesting place called Crazy B's.
While the coffee was certainly good, this was my first introduction to something called a Kolache.(pr; col AH chi) Imagine a pastry the size of an average dinner roll. Now imagine it being hollow and filled with scrambled egg and cheese, or some other filling of your choice. Interesting and quite good. To make them, they simply flatten the dough into a circle, place the filling in the middle and fold up the sides.
My next stop westward was Davis Bayou Gulf Islands Seashore. It was what you expected, short trails out to overlooks of the bayou.
On my AAA map, there was also a place called the Mississippi Sandhill Crane Preserve. With little information about it, I chose to start at the refuge visitor center. Overall the preserve had 19,000 acres of land between four separate areas.
Across the parking lot there's an easy 3/4 mile loop trail to an overlook of the preserve. I met a retired couple from Springfield, Illinois. We were hiking in opposite directions. They seemed surprised I had actually visited their city.
Back in the parking lot, we decided to take our chances in a different section of the preserve where there are two loop trails totaling 1 3/4 miles. I hit a long red light and they were already out on the trail when I finally found the new parking lot.
There were two trail maps at the kiosk. Oddly, they showed two very different things. As it turns out, the red trail is actually a loop.
Once again, an easy walk through the woods...
Off in the distance, you can see a railroad bridge. I didn't get lucky this time.
I never did see any of the elusive Mississippi Sandhill Cranes. In the 1970's there were only only thirty left. Fifty years on the endangered species list and that number is up to one hundred.
By the time I rolled into Biloxi, Mississippi, it was already late afternoon. This brought me to a curious place called Fly Llama Brewing. They had a very wide selection and they were generous to let people try as many things as they wanted. This usually means about a half a shot worth. Not much, but enough to get the flavors. The wildest thing on the beer list, a Carrot Cake IPA. I'm not a big carrot cake guy, but did try it. I would never order a pint, but the flavor certainly was interesting.
And what do you expect to see on the walls of a llama brewery? Yup, paintings of llamas.
I could have easily hung around a little longer. But, I still had to get to Bay St. Louis and find the Motel 6. And I really don't like doing that in the dark.
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