On The Move

We left Townsend with a specific destination in mind, the Gulf Shores area for food, can you imagine?  We had a hankering for oysters and shrimp and also intended to buy a bunch of fresh off the boat shrimp for the freezer.  Our first stop was a quick overnight outside of Montgomery and then to Summerdale, AL to the Rainbow Plantation Escapee park.  Escapee's is a club we have been members of for a long, long time, Jan's parents were members and we joined maybe back in 1996 or so.  They are advocates for full timing, work camping, boon docking info, domicile issues, mail forwarders, and have several parks around the country that are very affordable.  But our lifestyle has moved us away from their parks, but we decided to stay there while in the Gulf Shores area and try them again.  It was fine, it certainly was affordable but parking on mostly sand and other considerations, we'll probably not visit there again.

Making the best of it:-)

But the food we found!  First off we went to Acme Oyster House, a small chain that we have frequented many times in the NOLA area and have always been pleased with their consistently good food.  We saw they had opened one in Gulf Shores so we went and ordered oysters, when they came out they looked perfect, great size, plump, clean, even a baker's dozen.

Smiling at each other we picked one up and popped it into our mouths and wowser, they were the saltiest oysters we ever put in our mouths, maybe the saltiest thing we had ever put in our mouths!  We figured since the Appalachia beds had been closed this was the new normal in the area, but on to the poboy and onion rings.

And they were good, but not great

We hoped we weren't going to strike out for our visit.  Off to scope out fish for dinner, and check out the fresh shrimp.  Billy's is the place to go.  We go in, look around, get some red snapper for dinner and the lady asks if we'd be interested in soft shell crabs, they just came in and they are wonderful she said.  We had never cooked them before, and had rarely even eaten them but our memory was they were good, so we opted to try 2 of them and had them clean them.  They were wonderful!  You eat the entire crab.  They are only available in certain times of the year and are considered a delicacy.

Very soft and completely edible

I dredged them lightly in seasoned flour and topped them in a pan

Served up, crispy outside, crabby inside, delish!

So the next day we planned to go into Fairhope and go to another great restaurant we had been to, and was still getting rave reviews, Panini Pete's, but when we got to town, streets were blocked, cars were parked absolutely everywhere, people were everywhere, huh?  Turned out we hit the 69th Annual Arts and Craft Festival, so we punted and went to yet another restaurant we liked, Fish River Grill, now when we had been there before there was only one of them and now there are several with one handy on the outskirts of Fairhope.  We had a delicious lunch there, we split a shrimp poboy with OMG sauce on it.  OMG sauce is this delicious crawfish like gravy that would even make a flip flop taste good, hence OMG:-)

We drove around a bit, and planned out our last day there.  We had to do a little grocery shopping, have lunch and then go back to Billy's to get 6-7 pounds of shrimp.  We opted to go to the Shrimp Basket for lunch.  And man were we glad we picked this place, we had one of those lunches that are truly memorable, excellent even down to the service.  They had raw oysters of course and we debated and finally decided to try a dozen between us to see if the salty thing was unique or not.  They were wonderful oysters, so we don't know if Acme got their's somewhere different, but these were excellent, we scarfed them down so fast we forgot to take a picture until we were done:-)

Then Jan had a bowl of gumbo and I had a fried shrimp basket with some of the best onion rings we have had anywhere.  Lunch was an absolute hit.

That finished off our time in Gulf Shores and now we are making our way to Arizona by way of Texas, and yes with a few more food destinations I'll share later.  We spent last night in Vidalia, LA, just across the Mighty Mississippi River from Natchez, MS right on the water at Riverview RV Park.

Westward ho.