Friendly Mobile
French and Spanish influences, and some nifty boats.
Maybe it’s weird that my favourite view of Mobile is from across the bay, but here I was in Fairhope, Alabama, gawking at the beauty of this lovely city from way over on the other side. So far, in fact, that you can’t see all its details. But you can feel them.
Mobile, I learned that weekend last November just before Thanksgiving, is where Mardi Gras was invented. To this day it is being celebrated there, albeit in a slightly less boisterous version than the more famous one. “We don’t do this here,” a lovely grandma I met on Dauphin Street told me, mimicking someone flashing her breasts. “It’s more family friendly.”
I’ve only spent one night in the Big Easy and I didn’t find it family-unfriendly at all. Matter of fact, there were plenty of kids hanging around, even once it got dark (well, OK, in November it gets dark early, but still). While it’s easy to flirt and have all sorts of good time with whoever strikes your fancy in New Orleans, I wouldn’t say it’s especially easier there than in any other city I’ve ever visited. Even in exceptionally well-to-do Fairhope (home to an epic library fight over Margaret Atwood and to grandmas protesting Donald Trump in inflatable dick costumes), you can find adult fun pretty easily just by going outside with freshly-laundered clothes and a positive attitude.
One of the best places for this, I’ll bet you, is this very posh hotel across the bay from Mobile where the ducks are suitably discreet and the edible holiday train, delicious.
But you want to know about Mobile. I’d only briefly breezed through it during another road trip and I’d always wanted to stop long enough to smell a few azaleas in the first Alabama city Alexis de Tocqueville toured in 1832.
Mobile is known as the City of Six Flags: French, British, Spanish, Republic of Alabama, the Confederacy and the U.S. flags have flown over the oldest city in Alabama since 1702.
I knew in my head about the French influence but I was still surprised by how familiar the city felt. I grew up in Quebec City, also famously settled by French people though a century earlier than in Mobile, and I guess culture is a very powerful thing indeed because I instinctively understood the way Mobile is laid out and how it works.
Just outside the city is a museum to two decommissioned ships (one battleship, the USS Alabama, and a sub, the USS Drum) as well as a bunch of warplanes) and you know me, I never miss a chance to visit a museum. I have a particular fondness for decommissioned ships, having previously toured the USS North Carolina outside Wilmington and Old Ironsides (aka the USS Constitution) in Boston. Oh, and if you’re in that city, make sure to swing by the Tea Party Ships & Museum for a complete experience.
Mobile, thanks to its patchwork of historical influences and its location on the Gulf of Mexico, is an incredibly pleasant and laid-back city, firmly anchored in the best Southern traditions of great food and extraordinary hospitality. You will meet all kinds of people; I had a memorable encounter with Bryan-with-a-y, a man who went from champion pool player to someone whose domicile was temporarily in or around Bienville Square, and who told me his entire story like we’d known each other forever.
A weekend was not enough to experience all Mobile has to offer, but it was enough to make a profound impression on me.