the poor, poor gulf

i headed out for my trip to the gulf early to do some partying in birmingham on friday, and to see the motorcycle museum. spent the afternoon at the bottletree, really cool bar that books a decent selection of out of town underground acts, the decor of the place kills. the whole place is done up really cool, but the wall of black velvet paintings up front had me loving the place from the get go. so after several drinks i stumble out in search of a fleabag motel and dinner, both found real close to the bar. so after dinner and a few more drinks i head out to see wanda jackson play down the road from the bottletree, she put on a hell of a show but ended fairly early so i headed back to the bottletree. wound up getting completely crosseyed with the crazy bastards from the haints mc(http://haints69.blogspot.com/), those nutters know how to party down. from what i can remember, i had a hell of a time.

so me and the 600 lb hangover made it fairly early over to the barber motorcycle museum the next morning. this place is freaking huge, and i never thought i would say this, but way too much motorcycle for one day. i left totally overstimulated, so much to take in, i think i started to shut down towards the end, haha. just way too much to see in one visit, crazy collection of bikes. i will definitely have to go back. soon after, i got on the highway to the poor blighted gulf.

of course there has been minimal news coverage in the country, but the bp well is leaking again with several miles long slicks very prominent from the air. samples sent to lsu have confirmed that the slicks are identical to oil from the macondo well, bp of course denies this. and all this at a time when our country is about to allow bp to restart drilling operations. signs of the disaster still abound in the gulf and not just the prodigious amounts of dumpsters that dot the landscape, dumpsters labelled "oil contaminated material". or the natural beaches in wildlife reserves that are now closed to the public. or if you get up early enough in the mornings to beat the bp cleanup crews to the beach, you are greeted by crab and fish kills littering the sands. these are mostly picked up and carried off by the roving crews long before people are up and out on the beach each day. according to locals it turns out after initially starting to filter the sands in gulf shores/orange beach area by machine(which to me sounded like a good idea) the state decided to just cover all the beaches with new clean sand. it was almost unbearable to be at the beach and not swim in the sea. and don't get me started about how hard it was not to eat the seafood. but enough preaching

aside from all that, i still had a good time and even saw some wondrous things. it appears that bio-luminescent algae is in the waters of the gulf; while i have never seen it in the states, i spent a glorious drunken night swimming for hours in it in jamaica. i happened to see it late the first night while out drinking in the sand, lighting up as the surf crashed and agitated it. went back to the house and got the family so they could also see it and we spent the remainder of the night watching it light up, an activity revisited throughout the week. we saw dolphins off and on throughout the week, with me and mom catching them breach/jump one morning, i saw two jump at once through binoculars, freaking awesome