USS Alabama (BB-60) & USS Drum(SS-228)
 

On Friday, my wife and I drove down to Mobile, AL, to visit the USS Alabama Memorial Park. She's never been on a battleship, and I've never been inside a Gato-class submarine.

The park is located right off I-10, in Mobile Bay, and it is very easy to find. Parking was 2 bucks, and they have room for RVs/buses as well as regular cars and trucks. In the outdoor area surrounding the parking lot, they have a wide variety of tanks, planes, guns, and other vehicles including a B-52 bomber. There is a gift shop where you can buy souvenirs, and a little cafeteria where you can get drinks and snacks. The gift shop/cafeteria closes at 5 pm, so get your goodies before the tours if you get there after 2 pm. You'll need to figure on at least two hours to see everything, but the tours are all self guided so you can move at your own pace. There is a free mobile phone app you can download for Android or iPhone, that brings up extra info on each display when you punch in the numbers on a sign by each vehicle. The battleship/sub tour costs around $15 per person, but they give discounts for veterans, AAA, and other sorts of coupons/etc. Note that *all* of the money they get goes to the memorial, not one dime comes from taxpayers or the government, to keep the park open and running. Located between the battleship and the submarine is an indoor exhibit of mostly modern combat aircraft (a few WW2 vintage, like a P51) including an SR-71. There is a group FA-18 simulator ride you can buy for $5 a person, similar to the fancy ones at Disney World and so forth - a family with kids came off of it as we walked by and the young boys were bubbling over with 'that was AWESOME Dad!' comments.

It is absolutely worth the trip, if you are into WW2 ships/subs/aircraft. You will be climbing a lot of ladders on the battleship if you want to see everything, but the views are spectacular and the ship is *full* of informative displays and even a movie that runs continuously. If you are very large, or claustrophobic, you may not enjoy the submarine as much as other folks (but you will certainly gain an appreciation for WW2 submariners!). The sub is completely out of the water and up on dry land, and although they pump some air conditioning through the boat for your comfort - it will still be warm inside. Move slow, watch your head no matter what direction you step.

Between us, we took over four hundred photos, some of which I'll link here later.

<salute!>

OK, testing to see if this works.


http://imgur.com/a/lac6h

That should link you to a photo album of the pics from my camera. They are not fully sorted in order yet, but there are 189 of them to look at. I'll be adding captions and such to them over the next few days.
The lady in some of the pics is my wife, and she is 5'5" tall, for scale when she is standing next to things. :)

The sub pics start about halfway through the album. They are darker, because the lighting in the sub was much dimmer than on the battleship, and there were *lots* of places where I literally couldn't get my camera farther than a foot from something to take a picture! It was *cramped* in there.

That looks like a place well worth a visit. Great pictures and thanks for sharing :sunny: