We drove down to the Gulf Coast to see Gulf State Park.  We found out that most of the appeal to this park were the ponds, beaches, and the pier.   Some of the trees were almost growing sideways.  One of the pictures below I had to take sideways to get the entire tree in the picture.  There was a boardwalk to went over the road to the beach.  It was too much walking for me so we decided to find the pier by road.

By the pier we found the most beautiful beach.  The white sand of the gulf coast was a great contrast to the ocean water and waves.

The seagulls and birds were everywhere.  We decided to walk out on the pier to the very end.  It took a while but it was worth it.  We stopped and rested several times and took that time to quiz the fisherman lining the pier about what they were catching.  Many of them said they had not been catching anything but a few had caught some.  When we got to the end I took some pictures back toward the beach.  We also got to see a plane towing a banner.  First time I have ever seen one so I had to take a picture.  Couldn’t get both the banner and the plane in the same picture so here is the banner…  LOL

As we walked toward the end of the pier we passed a fish cleaning station with several people who were cleaning their fish.  They were throwing all the offal to the birds.  I did get some pictures of the birds catching their food but it is hard to see what they are actually doing.  However, I thought you might enjoy pictures of some of the birds.

When we left the pier we headed out one of the spits of land that went out into the bay.  Note the houses on stilts due to the possibility of hurricanes and flooding.  There were a fort and museum on the end of this spit that we were planning on seeing.  When we got to the fort we discovered that both of them were closing soon and we really didn’t have time to view it all in the time left.  We decided to go back the next day but the weather turned bad so we decided to stay home.  We never did make it back.  But here are the pictures we took on our drive.

The next leg of our trip is on to Robert, Louisiana.   See ya soon.