Sand in the Coffee, Vol. 15: why you should drive the back roads
Cup’s poured. Pull up a chair and let me tell you about the turn you keep missing.
Every June, I watch the same thing happen. Traffic stacks up on Perdido Key Drive like somebody parked a barge in the middle of it. Visitors sit in that line, windows up, A/C blasting, missing the actual coast entirely. They are, technically, on the beach road. They are not, in any meaningful sense, experiencing it.
If you missed last week’s column on doing the beach right with small humans, go catch up real quick. Then come back. We’re going for a drive.
The road is the destination
Here’s something locals figured out a long time ago: the back roads on this stretch of coast aren’t detours. They are the trip. Old Perdido Key Drive, the quiet residential cuts through Ono Island, the canopied two-lanes running north through Gulf Shores toward Foley — these are where you actually see the place. Spanish moss. A heron standing in a ditch like he owns the county. A hand-painted sign for boiled peanuts that may or may not still be there. That’s the coast nobody photographs for Instagram, and it’s better for it.
Check live conditions at the beach before you go, then leave a solid hour earlier than you think you need. That buffer isn’t for traffic. It’s for stopping.
Where the back roads lead
Big Lagoon State Park on the western end is one of those places you miss if you’re doing 55 on the main drag with your eyes on the gulf. But if you slow down and come at it from the back side, it hits differently — a boardwalk over the water, views of the lagoon that make you feel like you accidentally got to somewhere untouched. Take the drive.
Gulf State Park is the same story on the Alabama side. Yes, everyone knows about the beach access. Fewer people bother to drive the interior park roads, and those are the ones lined with long-leaf pines that make the whole thing feel like a different era. You’ll want to stop. Do it.
While you’re meandering, Perdido Key State Park is worth threading into the route. The road to get there is half the reason to go. Short on crowds, long on that particular kind of quiet that June on the gulf used to be before the condos arrived.
Feed yourself off the beaten path
The back roads approach applies to eating, too. GTs On The Bay sits on the water in a way that requires you to actually want to find it — meaning the crowd thins out considerably compared to anything on the main drag. Same goes for Ole River Grill, which is the kind of spot you stumble on when you’ve taken one too many turns and then consider it your personal discovery forever after.
Doc’s Seafood Shack and Bahama Bob’s Beach Side Cafe aren’t secrets exactly, but they feel like them when you roll up on a Tuesday having found them under your own power rather than from a Top Ten list.
The one rule for back-road driving down here
You will get behind someone going nineteen miles per hour in a golf cart, a man on a bicycle pulling a small trailer, or a truck with a kayak hanging so far out the back that you can’t see around it. You will also drive past something worth looking at approximately every four minutes. These two facts are related. The coast has been quietly enforcing its own speed limit for years. Consider complying.
There’s no app that routes you well on the back roads down here. Ask someone local where the slow way is. We know. We just don’t usually tell.
Wave when you pass — I’m probably in that line at Publix at Sorrento pretending I’m not a local who should know better.
— Kathy