During its first 100 years Mobile was a colony of France, Britain and finally Spain before it joined the United States in 1813. The architecture speaks of its heritage - beautiful, stately houses and public buildings.
Alabama is only about 60 miles wide at the southern end where we crossed, bringing us to state number eight - Florida! I'd expected the rain to miraculously disappear now that we were in the sunshine state, but it stayed with us.
We dropped off the I10 into the Gulf Coast to look for accommodation. Our original plan was just to stay in a highway motel, but thought it would be good to see a little more of the world we were passing through.
There were lots of apartment resorts and fun parks, but it was very quiet. We stopped at an old ocean front hotel, and took the receptionist's advice and headed to the Mexican restaurant across the road for dinner.
The next day we put our experience to use and decided against taking the interstate in the rain. We've done this before and the traffic speed and road spray from trucks make traveling quite a stressful exercise. We opted for the older, quieter highways with slightly lower speed limits, a few towns, but minimal traffic and plenty of 'local' to see.
Pine forests lined the road, and often the water was up to the forest edge, with people fishing in the 'gutters'. Rivers were swollen hundreds of metres beyond their theoretical banks.
We've crossed into our last time zone on the eastbound trip, now in Eastern Time.
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