Bike Ride To Orange Beach

Today we got up at around 7:00 am ate breakfast then took the dogs for a long walk.  Then we decided to take a bike ride on one of the Back Country Trails behind the park to Orange Beach.  Like many towns in Florida and Alabama, especially on the coast, there is no downtown to the town of Orange Beach.  There are businesses that stretch along the main roads in the town but there is no courthouse square that you would normally think of as a downtown.   The main thing Orange Beach has going for it is the many high rise (15-30 floors) condos that are lined up and down the beach on the Gulf  of Mexico.  These condos bring in a lot of money to the towns of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach.  In addition to the condos there are several rv parks besides the state park we are in which has 500 sites with about 80% of them being reserved long term through March 2013.  We rode about 15 miles today with maybe one third of it being on the trail and the rest on the side of the roads.  One good thing about this area is they have bike lanes on many of the major roads to make biking much safer. With the time change it gets dark here between 5 and 5:30 so we are trying to get up earlier and get outside and put off doing other things till after dark that we can do inside.     

 

 Here are some of the condos on the beach

Janet really liked this grass.

More condos

We thought this plant was really cool

Some of the bike trail heading back from the gulf

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