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We are back from Alabama! And I have to go back to real work tomorrow :(

We took a few days at Gulf Shores while we were there, so I can now cross off "warm ocean" on my biomes list. My sister asked me if the Gulf was really different enough from other beaches I've been to, so, bearing in mind my previous experience is limited to Atlantic beaches from Acadia National Park in Maine to Murrel's Inlet in South Carolina, here's what I've got:

1. The tides. The Gulf needs to get itself straightened out on its tides, seriously. One high tide and one low tide per 24 hours is just wrong. That's not enough tides! Sort yourself out!

2. The water! Is warm! The sand is white and soft! OK that was also pretty much true in South Carolina but it was definitely nice.

3. The season is so much longer, March to October instead of Memorial Day to Labor Day, and you wouldn't think two months is that much difference but it's the difference between being on for a third of the year and being on for two-thirds of the year, and I think that really did change a lot of things about how everything worked, from the ecosystem to the restaurants.

4. All the lights that face the beach are red, for the sea turtles. This was a bit worrying at first until we realized why, but it's actually really nice. All outdoor lighting should have to follow those rules, it's not just the sea turtles that would benefit.

5. It was very car-centric, which I was not expecting! Pretty much all the other beach towns I've been to have been very walkable; if they don't have a boardwalk they at least have a walkable shopping/eating area right next to the beach that beachgoers are invited to ramble onto. That's often the main difference between a Beach Town and a Town that Has A Beach. Gulf Shores (and Orange Beach) as far as I could tell did not have that; other than a few beachfront bars, the closest they seemed to have were shopping centers half a mile or so inland. All the buildings actually lining the beach were hotels with no retail, and all the restaurants and stores basically assumed you'd drive there, even the ones only a street or so back from the beach. And honestly the shopping etc. wasn't nearly as good, either. The restaurants were fine? But nothing to write home about, the seafood was ok, the shopping was all pretty generic, and there was no real equivalent to what I'm used to from the more Northern towns, the buskers and palm-readers and self-consciously quirky little places. I suspect that's partly because the Alabama beach towns are newer - the difference between 1940s and 1960s means a lot in US car culture - partly because Alabama generally is more car-centered - and partly because the weather is so much nicer! You actually can spend the whole day in or on the ocean without hating yourself, unlike on, say, Fire Island, where you've gotta have lots of other amusements because the ocean isn't actually that nice for more than a couple of dips and it's probably raining all week anyway. But apparently they're planning to put in a boardwalk at Gulf Shores soon? So they may have realized they're missing out.

6. So many palmettos! And pelicans! And lots of seashells I didn't recognize!

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This is where I admit that I did not know Alabama isn't landlocked. But now I see they squeezed a little coastal outcropping in between Florida and Mississippi! TIL.

The border with Florida is actually a lot more complicated than I'd realized before looking at it close up - it zigzags around Perdido Key and Ono Island in a really weird way (we didn't make it any closer to Florida than Wolf Bay though.) A surprising proportion of the AL coast is protected park and wildlife refuge, too!

*blinks* There are places where there are more than one high tide and one low tide per day?

...Yes? Are you trying to convince me it's normal too?? Most coastlines that get tides have high tides about twelve hours apart, and low tides in between. Most of the Gulf of Mexico and I think bits of Southeast Asia and the polar oceans are basically the only places that don't. I kept expecting that if the tide was coming in for early in the morning it would be going out by the afternoon but it kept just coming in! All day! It was weird!

Edited 2023-05-18 04:00 (UTC)

The Gulf coast is where I was in the formative years when I learned about tides, so I guess I never noticed that tides in other places didn’t match!

Ok, that's fair! (My mother and sister who both spent most of their lives near places that have *normal* tides, and didn't know what I was talking about when I said they must have read the tide tables wrong, don't have that excuse.)

How does that even work, not to generally have two of each??

I don't know! I think my college oceanography class skipped over that, I'll have to check the textbook later. All I've been able to find online is "it's kind of shaped like a bowl, so the water sloshes around weirdly compared to open ocean". But they can predict them pretty well, so there must be a better model than that.

Seems suspect and unnatural... are we sure there aren't Lovecraftian sea monsters involved?

I have been in the environmental movement a long time, but I didn't realize until a few years ago about how bad it is with artificial lights at night for night-living insects and other animals!

At least light pollution is at least potentially easier to fix than other kinds of pollution...

My county actually recently bought all-LED streetlights. They aren't particularly low-light-pollution, but they *are* broken, so they shine all different colors, and it's really great. If you're putting in LEDs anyway, it's no more expensive or difficult to do colors than white, and they're so much better not just for animals but for humans, too. (I've always wondered how much of who I grew up to be was determined by the fact that my parents put me to bed my entire childhood with a streetlight shining directly on my face all night.)

My grandmother has a house in Orange Beach on the Alabama coast, and it's my main memory of beaches! (I think I swam in the Pacific when I was 15ish, though the beaches were not the main attraction of that vacation; not sure if I've swam in the Atlantic. Maybe?) Now I'm wishing Orange Beach had a boardwalk, lol. I definitely love the soft, white sand. Hopefully I'll get to visit again in the next year or two.

Oh, cool! The sand was very nice, and somehow didn't even burn our feet even when the sun was beating down all day.

Gulf Shores just the other side of the state park is theoretically getting a boardwalk soon, and Orange Beach now has The Wharf, which felt pretty new, and is the closest thing we found to a boardwalk in three days.

Ooh, I'll have to check out The Wharf the next time I go down there!

Warm ocean is so wonderful and disconcerting! All of my ocean experience was the north Atlantic until I went to Hawai'i in 2004, and I loved the warm lovely ocean, but it also made me feel like it was trying to lull me into a false sense of security.

Since it was still early May the water wasn't quite warm enough to feel wrong - it was about like the Chesapeake Bay in late August - but yeah when I was in South Carolina later in the summer it was like that. The ocean is supposed to feel actively hostile, not warm and welcoming!

It took some thinking to logic out why the Gulf would have diurnal tides, but I guess it makes sense! But feels wrong!

I am surprised that it didn't have a walkable area for at least some alternative amusements / to bring in money, but maybe they don't expect it culturally after not being used to having walking as an option? It feels even more wrong than the tide thing.

There were some alternative amusements but none pleasantly walkable from the beach or the main beach parking! Possibly they don't make enough to be that close when the beach is so nice? And there was a main street with shops on it but it was 90% parking lots like any suburb around here, and nothing very interesting or unique (except a LOT of ice cream places. And chain beach gear places that all had the same stuff. And extremely boring boutiques where everything was gray, maybe in Southern Alabama those count as interesting?)