Episode: 4020
Title: HPR4020: Alabama to Florida
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4020/hpr4020.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:40:12

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This is Hacker Public Radio, episode 4,000, and 20 for Friday the 29th of December 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Alabama to Florida.
It is part of the series Travel.
It is hosted by Ahu Kha, and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
We start traveling across the Gulf Coast on our way to Florida.
Hello, this is Ahu Kha, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio.
And another exciting episode in our series about RV Travels.
And we are now in Alabama Gulf Shores.
And it is January the 8th of 2023.
So while we're having breakfast, we started researching options.
For our stay here, there are some attractions worth checking out.
We will undoubtedly try a few, but we felt the need for outdoor activities.
So we went to Gulf State Park and did some hiking on the trails there.
I think we did about three miles, which was quite enough for us.
So then we came back to the RV to rest.
As I get older, my body can do less, and it takes longer to recover.
So I lay down for a two hour nap, which I needed.
Well, by the end of the day, I started to feel like, you know,
maybe this wasn't me just being tired.
I might be coming down with a cold, so I went to bed early.
The next day, January 9th, I slept in late, took it easy all day.
I still had a headache and back pain.
Neither is extreme, fortunately.
January 10th, Gulf Shores.
I had a bad night.
The headache and the back ache bothered me all night.
My legs were cramping, and I managed to sweat until the sheets were wet.
So it's another day of rest to try and beat this thing, whatever it is.
January 11th, Gulf Shores.
I did better last night, and felt better in the morning.
So after breakfast, we did some shopping for RV supplies.
Our freshwater supply equipment was displaying problems like leaking.
So we got a new freshwater hose.
Another one is a backup.
A Y connector for the water supply and a water pressure regulator.
We did that quite expeditiously.
Now, I have to say, those hoses we ended up returning them.
They just, they tended to leak.
I think they're just poor manufacturing.
Anyway, we had a couple of other hoses, including our heated one.
So after we did the shopping, we went into Mobile to see the USS Alabama,
which is a World War II battleship.
Now, many of the World War II battleships were eventually sold off for scrap.
But in the 1960s, some citizens of Alabama raised the money to bring the ship to Mobile Bay,
where it now forms the core of a military museum.
There is also a World War II submarine, the USS Drum, on display.
They have other things as well, such as aircraft and armor,
but battleship and submarine are the real attractions here.
They have set them each up with self-guided tours that take you over most of the ship,
and it does give you a little idea of what is like to serve on these vessels.
When we started planning this trip, I was thinking mostly about the NASA facilities
that we would visit.
But it's turned out to be rather more than I thought of a military history trip.
But you know, when you have attractions like the National World War II Museum
and the USS Alabama, you really have to visit them.
We practice a form of serendipitous travel where we go someplace
and then look around to see what they have to offer.
And usually there are things worth visiting.
So golf shores again on January 12th, another rainy day.
So we stayed in.
On January 13th, it was time to move on.
So we didn't really spend as much time doing anything in Alabama
compared to what we thought we would when we booked a week's stay.
Well, life is like that sometimes.
So on the 13th, we got a reasonably early start in golf shores
and then got back on the I-10 into the Florida Panhandle
to get to our next park, which is in Panacea, Florida.
I started the day strong and thought that just maybe I'd put that illness behind me.
But by the time we got to Panacea, I was still feeling kind of crappy.
And so I got another night with a lot of sleep, 12 hours worth.
And it was cold all day, above freezing, but not a lot above it.
Now, on the 14th in still in Panacea, Florida,
it's still cold, probably will be for the next few days.
That is too bad because most of the things we want to do here are outdoor activities.
I'm hoping it gets better in the next few days, but for today I'm staying in.
Panacea on the 15th of January.
I slept in and felt a little bad when I got up,
and so I stayed in for one more day.
But we did go out to buy more propane and do the shopping,
and I started to feel better.
So I decided that I would just go to bed at my normal time,
which is like around 9.30, and get up at my usual time,
which is 6am, and get out tomorrow.
So, Panacea on the 16th.
This was Martin Luther King Day in the United States.
I put my plan into action.
I got up at 6am, showered, and had breakfast.
I still felt good.
Now we had reserved a boat ride for later in the week,
and we looked around for some local hiking opportunities.
We picked a hike in the St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge,
called the Otter Lake Loop Trail.
It's about four miles long, and it's probably a little longer than my back
would hold up for it.
But on a nice sunny day with blue skies,
it was just great to be outdoors.
I used a new app, both to pick out the hiking trail and to follow it.
It's a paid app called All Trails.
It's not a cheap app, but I think it provides value for money.
You can get all the details in advance,
such as the length of the hike, how difficult it is,
how much elevation change you will experience.
You can read reviews and see photos from previous hikers.
Best of all, it tracks your progress along the map of the trail,
and sends an alert to your phone if you miss a turn.
We got such an alert and had to backtrack about 40 meters when we missed our turn.
I think this app is a keeper for me.
Panacea on January 17th.
Today the weather is perfect for being outdoors.
So we headed off to Bald's Point State Park to do a little more hiking.
Many of the trees seem to have blackened trunks,
which I suspect means fire occurred at some point.
The long leaf pine trees dominate the landscape,
but they seem to be mostly bare trunk with just a crown of needles at the top.
The park has a river that empties into a lake
and we are mostly hiking around all of that water.
We thought it might empty into the ocean, but it doesn't seem to do so.
I wanted to see the Gulf of Mexico,
and this is our last stop along the Gulf Shore.
So when we finished in the park, we drove to a nearby public beach.
The trees and driftwood had fantastic shapes,
making this far different from the Atlantic coast of New England.
One nice thing is that on this beach and on the trails we have been on,
dogs on leash are welcome.
You are, of course, expected to pick up after them.
This might be a good moment for me to mention something that I have links to all of the photos,
for some reason you want to see them.
You can either get them off of the webpage,
or I put links to my Flickr account in the show notes,
so you can see day by day what photos we took.
Again in Panacea,
today we headed, and this is on the 18th of January,
we headed to Wakula Spring State Park.
Now a guy named Ed Ball bought up all this property and put a fence around it,
which pissed off a lot of the locals.
But then he sold it to the state,
and they turned it into a public park.
It was only about 25 minutes away from where we were staying,
and there were several things to caught our eye.
One was the boat ride on the Wakula River,
and Cheryl had bought our tickets and made our reservations a few days previously.
The other was a hike to a sinkhole.
So we started with the hike,
which went through some different woods from what we saw at St. Mark's and at Bald Point.
There seemed to be a lot of southern magnolia trees,
for instance, in fewer of the long-leaf pine.
And the lichen on the tree trunks was very striking,
almost like someone with a paintbrush had gone around slapping paint on the trunks.
At the end of the trail, we came to the Cherokee sink,
a sinkhole that is 75 feet deep.
We found some young folks swimming there.
We walked around to take some pictures and enjoy the view.
There are caves off of the sinkhole,
and diving is permitted, though we didn't see anyone diving.
Interestingly, the brochure we got when we entered the park
stated that swimming is not permitted in the sinkhole,
though that did not deter the kids.
After we finished here, we walked back to the lodge for our boat ride.
Now, there's a major spring here,
which feeds the Wakula River,
and that flows into the St. Mark's River,
and then ultimately into the Gulf.
Now, part of the river is off limits as a wildlife refuge,
but we went about a mile downriver,
and then came back, and along the way,
we were stopping to view birds,
alligators, all sorts of wildlife.
There are bald eagles in the park,
but none of the bald eagles are on the river,
because the ospreys drive them away.
How eagles are much larger than ospreys,
but apparently the ospreys are more aggressive.
It's like that saying it's not the size of the dog in the fight.
It's the size of the fight in the dog.
We did see one of the ospreys
perched on top of a tree in the middle of the river.
Now, this river was used for films,
including the Tarzan films with Johnny Weissmuller,
and the creature from the Black Lagoon.
We did see one alligator with a bird in its mouth,
dinner time for alligator,
and a group of young alligators resting not far from mom.
So a fun day at the Wakula Springs.
Again in Panacea,
this is on January 19th.
We went for a walk just a few blocks from the park,
first to a boat launch into the bay,
and into the Gulf specimen,
marine laboratory, and aquarium.
Now, they collect specimens in marine life
and ship them to universities, aquariums, and laboratories all over.
And they have their own little aquarium
where among other things they nurse injured animals.
And we saw a couple of sea turtles
that are due to be released back into the wild next week, for example.
Some of the aquarium tanks let you touch the marine life,
which is big with the kids,
but you get reasonably up close with the animals in any case.
Now this is our last full day in Panacea.
And it's interesting how we go into small,
out of the way place,
knowing nothing about it,
and find fun things to do.
This little aquarium was four blocks from our RV park,
and we spent an hour and a half there, quite happily.
Plus Cheryl found some earrings that she liked of sea turtles.
So this is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off,
and is always encouraging you to support free software.
Bye-bye!
Today's show is released on our Creative Commons,
Attribution 4.0 International License.
