The Traveling Fool
Traveling off the tourist path. Talking about those places most tourists just don't know about because, well, nobody ever told them. Also travel tips and news about travel and tourism to make your trip a little easier, cheaper and more memorable.
The Traveling Fool
Exploring The Fascinating History of Ft Gaines and Ft Morgan
What secrets do the bastions of Fort Gaines hide from the Civil War era? Journey with us to Dauphin Island, where we'll uncover the rich history of Fort Gaines, a pivotal stronghold in the Battle of Mobile Bay. Explore the pentagon-shaped fortification that protected the port of Mobile and discover the stories of soldiers who lived within its walls. From its completion in 1861 to its strategic significance during the Civil War and beyond, this episode offers a deep dive into American military history. As we walk through tunnels and gun magazines, we'll also touch on its sister fort, Fort Morgan, located just across the bay.
But our adventure doesn't stop there! We shift gears to bring you practical tips on maximizing your airfare savings with the powerful tool that is Google Travel. Whether you're a spontaneous traveler or plan meticulously, we'll show you how to uncover hidden deals to destinations worldwide. Learn how to use Google Travel's map interface to visualize and compare flight prices, allowing you to fly affordably to exciting locales like Miami, Cancun, and Tokyo. Tune in for this blend of historical intrigue and practical travel advice, perfect for history buffs and travel enthusiasts alike!
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Well, welcome back to another episode of the Traveling Fool. And before we get started, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you can catch all these podcasts. Also, stay tuned to the end of this one because I'm going to give you another tip Now. Last week I told you how to save some money on airfare using the site. Now I'm going to tell you a different site this week where you can save more money on airfares.
Speaker 1:So this week we're going down the history trail. We're talking about two historic locations located on the Gulf of Mexico. Both of them played a very important part in US history. We're talking about Alabama, on the Gulf of Mexico, at Mobile Bay, and the first place we're going to talk about is Fort Gaines. Fort Gaines is a Civil War era fort. Now it was established way back in 1821, but it took a while to complete. It took back until 1861 to complete the thing because tidewater kept coming in. I mean, it is right there on the Gulf, right there on the bay, mobile Bay and the tidewater kept messing up the building and construction of the fort and there were land disputes and overruns and it cost too much and just various other issues. You know, typical government stuff. They had government bureaucracy even way back then. But this is a beautiful old fort. It's built in the shape of a pentagon. The original plans called for ten guns to be mounted on each of the five walls and they had four flank howitzers located there. I mean, there was a lot of firepower on this thing. Now, why did they build it on Mobile Bay? Well, back then, even as now, mobile and the port of Mobile is a very important inland port. It sits so 20, 30, 40 miles upriver, or up the little bay there from the Gulf of Mexico. So they built this fort, or they constructed it, to guard the bay and guard the entrance into the port of Mobile.
Speaker 1:And today you can visit Fort Gaines and it is. It's an interesting trip through history. You can walk through the bastions and go into the various gun turret houses and all of this stuff. I mean there's barracks and all kinds of stuff there. You can walk down through the fort, through the tunnels, and just imagine what it might be like on a hot summer day in Alabama in the 1800s. And you're sitting there, crowded in this place, with two or three hundred people guarding Mobile Bay. I mean, I spent 20 years in the military and I've been in a lot of really crappy locations, but I could not imagine spending a summer in Alabama camped out in this fort With all the humidity and all the heat. It had to be unbearable.
Speaker 1:But the fort saw action during the Civil War and it was actually one of two sites that produced one of the largest naval battles in the history of the Civil War and it was the greatest Union naval victory during the war. During the war, the naval forces of the Union and Confederacy had gunboats, ironclads and land forces all engaged in a massive battle called the Battle of Mobile Bay. It took place in August of 1864. Union soldiers were under the command of Admiral Farragut and General Granger. They had 12 wooden ships, two gunboats, four ironclads and 5,500 men, and the Confederate forces were under the command of Admiral Buchanan and General Page. Now the Confederacy had three gunboats, one ironclad and about 1,500 men, but they had these two massive forts. Now Fort Gaines was under the command of Colonel Anderson, which had about 820, 830 soldiers, and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about the Battle of Mobile Bay when we go to the second location. But after the end of the Civil War Fort Gaines was still manned with a coastal artillery unit during World War.
Speaker 1:I had an anti-aircraft gunnery school during and after the war and during World War II. It was a campsite for the Alabama National Guard and a US Coast Guard unit was stationed there to patrol for enemy submarines patrolling off the Gulf of Mexico during World War II. Enemy submarines patrolling off the Gulf of Mexico during World War II. The fort was finally abandoned by the military and it was sold to the city of Mobile in the 1920s and is now owned by Dauphin Island Park and Beach Board, and you can tour the fort, walk down the tunnel systems, peek inside all the gun magazines and there's letters that are written by both Union and Confederate soldiers to family members telling them about conditions and day-to-day life. You walk up one of the ramps to the top of the walls where the gun emplacements were located and look out over Mobile Bay. There's also a gift shop, a small museum and one of the buildings inside a fort with artifacts and info on the fort itself.
Speaker 1:There's not too many old Civil War forts left and any time you get up close to a piece of history it is really worth it. Any time you're going through the Gulf of Mexico and you're around the Gulf of Mobile or Alabama, you need to stop in and check this place out. It's recognized as one of America's 11 most endangered historic sites by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, so there's no telling how much longer this thing's going to be around, but the fort is located on Dolphin Island and it's open from 9 to 5, 7 days a week, except Thanksgiving, christmas, christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The admission is really reasonable I think I paid $10 to go in and Dolphin Island is just off I-10, just south of Mobile, so it doesn't take very long to get there.
Speaker 1:Now, the second place I'm going to tell you about is it's sister fort. Now it sits across Mobile Bay and the easiest way to get there is to take the ferry which is located just right outside Fort Gaines. I don't actually remember the schedule on that thing, but you can look up the Fort Morgan-Dolphin Island Ferry. I think it runs about every hour or so and it doesn't cost you much. You can either go as a pedestrian on board or you can drive your car on there and just take a little 15, 20-minute excursion across the bay and you will arrive on Fort Morgan or right at Fort Morgan, and Fort Morgan sits on Mobile Point and it's about 22 miles straight down the road from Gulf Shores, alabama. Now it's a very far western tip of the island.
Speaker 1:It's located directly across the bay from Fort Gaines, and Fort Morgan occupies an area where in the 1700s the Spanish built a military fortification there and in the early 1800s the United States built a fort. The US Fort. Fort Bower was attacked and captured by the British during the War of 1812. And in 1819, they began a new construction on the fort and in 1833, it was officially named Fort Morgan after Daniel Morgan, which was a Revolutionary War hero. And just like Fort Gaines it was built in a pentagon shape. It has a real wide dry moat and real thick interior walls, so you actually walk through a tunnel, walk through the dry moat, to get into the fort. It's a really cool fort to explore.
Speaker 1:At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Alabama State Militia seized both Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines from the federal troops. At that time Fort Morgan had about 45 guns and 640 Confederate soldiers manning it under the command of a guy named General Page. Now it also laid minefields in the waters consisting of about 67 mines called Fretwell Singer Torpedoes. That's important because you might have heard the saying. Well, hold on. I'll tell you that in a second.
Speaker 1:In August, during the Battle of Mobile Bay, ships from the Union Navy started passing the forts. They wanted to get in position for naval bombardments and land attacks and one of the torpedoes went off underneath a Union Iron Clan monitor to come sink, causing it to sink, and this caused widespread panic among the captain and all the ships that were following it. And he signaled Admiral Farragut on one of the ships for new instructions, saying you know, this place is just full of landmines and torpedoes and they're sinking our ships. What shall we do? Here you go. This is when Farragut spoke those famous quotes damn the torpedoes full speed ahead. And that's where you get that saying from. Yes, sir, that happened at the Battle of Mobile Bay, right there off the coast of Fort Morgan.
Speaker 1:After the surrender of Fort Gaines, the Union Army laid siege to Fort Morgan and they thought the bombardment would hit that 80,000 pounds of gunpowder. So General Page did the only sensible thing and ordered the powder to be flooded, knowing that the end was imminent. And then he ordered the remaining guns to be spiked and destroyed. And then he raised the white flag of surrender. Now, later on, in the late 1800s, the fort was expanded to include five concrete batteries with fire control, electricity and communications.
Speaker 1:The fort was active during the Spanish-American War. It was used for training base during World War I. The fort was abandoned after World War I and fell in disrepair. But at the onset of World War II the fort was resurrected again and pressed into use by the US military, erected again and pressed into use by the US military. Five 155-millimeter howitzers were installed at the fort and an airfield was built adjacent to the fort. In 1946, the War Department turned the fort over to the state of Alabama and completely abandoned the fort by 1947.
Speaker 1:And today the fort is operated by the Alabama Historical Commission and they're responsible for historic preservation of the fort and it's open to the public 8 to 5 every day, except Thanksgiving, christmas and New Year's. They have a museum directly outside the fort that's open from 9 to 4 pm, daily as well. You walk through the tunnel into the main entrance into the fort. What's inside? You can walk around, explore all you want, exploring all the various casemates, gun emplacements, batteries. Climb on top of the walls. You can view the entire fort and the surrounding area from the viewing deck and get a really good feel for how large that complex is.
Speaker 1:Fort Morgan is also a National Historic Landmark and it's located 180, which is right at the west end of the island, and it's about 23 miles from Gulf Shores. And the Mobile Bay Ferry is right next to the fort, so you can make a day out of it. You can check out one of the forts, jump on the ferry, which is a cool little ferry ride. Then you run across the bay and check out the other fort and seeing these old historic sites, I mean it's history and it's great to relive and look back at history and check out our nation's history. If you've got kids, I guarantee you they're going to have a blast, and that's where I think I learned a lot of my love of history is when I was a kid. Every time we went on a vacation, my parents always made it a point to see historic locations. And you check out these two. You will not be disappointed. They are both excellent, excellent examples of old military, historic forts that played a vital role in our nation's history, location of the biggest naval battle in the Civil War, a very important part of history. So those are two sites you need to check out on the Gulf of Mexico in Alabama and when you get finished, just cruise on up the Gulf Shores and have a blast, because there is so much stuff to see and do up there. You will have so much fun.
Speaker 1:And I promised you a tip about how to get some cheap airfares. So here we go. In the last podcast, I told you about how to use Kayak Explore, the site kayakcom slash explore, to look how to find airfares all over the world by using a map and setting your dates. This week, I'm going to tell you about how to use Google doing the same thing and the reason you want to use both of these things. I'm going to tell you you can use both of them every day. It's going to take you a total of about five minutes. If you wanted to check them out every day, you could, because the prices on these flights change daily, but they're both going to show you one different airlines sometimes and two. You're going to find different destinations, different airlines and different prices, believe it or not.
Speaker 1:And Google does something a little bit different than Kayak. If you go to googlecom forward slash travel, forward slash explore, it's going to pop up and you can look at airline fares anywhere. You get the map on the right, or map of the world, and you can zoom in and out, or map of the world, and you can zoom in and out and you can drag your little cursor and move the map all around. And on the left-hand side it asks you do you want a round trip or one way, and how many people See this is something Kayak doesn't do. And you can also choose economy, premium economy, business and first class. So let's just, I'll just do this in real time. We'll do round trip, one person, economy, and I'm going to put Houston Intercontinental Airport IAH is the symbol as the departing airport and as far as destination anywhere, and then right below it it's got a one-week trip in the next six months using flexible dates. Or you can do two weeks, or you can do a weekend, or you can do specific dates, but we're going to do a one-week trip sometime in the next six months using flexible dates.
Speaker 1:I click, done. I hit flights only because I don't care about hotels, I'll do something else with that. And up it pops. So let's see what we get here. Now you get a map view and it also on the left. It tells you all kinds of stuff and you can zoom in and out on the map. If you zoom in, you actually get more flights showing. If it's zoomed out a little bit, you're just going to get a certain amount of flights that pop up on the map.
Speaker 1:Uh, let's see. I can go houston to miami for 78 on spirit. If I zoom in a little bit, I can go to Cancun for $291. And these are round-trip flights. Bermuda for $627. Let me zoom in a little more and see what's going on in the Caribbean San Juan, puerto Rico, for $151. Now that's a round-trip flight on Spirit Airlines and it's actually oh, it says one it's non-stop on the way and one stop on the way back. A round-trip for $151 to go to a Caribbean island isn't too bad. If we zoom. Well, we'll just scroll the map a little bit.
Speaker 1:Now, the neat thing about using this is you can say well, you know, I want to go on a vacation, don't want to spend a lot of money, really not sure where the hell I want to go, just somewhere kind of cool. So let's just look, I could go to Paris for $526,000, london for $512,000, zurich for $533,000, berlin for about512, zurich for $533, berlin for about $700 and you can just kind of scroll in and out and see where you want to go. And if you check every day and do the same thing at the same time on kayak look on Google, look on kayak. Let's say you've always wanted to go to Asia. It's always so expensive, but people have always told you how pretty it is. So let's just look In Asia. The flights are expensive. Let's see Philippines $900. Singapore $935. Thailand $978. Vietnam $982.
Speaker 1:And you can go over to Japan anywhere from $950 up to about $1,200. You know, this always amazes me. You look at, I can go to Tokyo for $955, but Nagasaki will cost me $2,200. $22.93. I would imagine I'd go to Tokyo and take a train to Nagasaki a lot cheaper than that. I can go to Seoul, korea, for $865. That's a really good price, because Korea is usually expensive.
Speaker 1:But let's say you've always wanted to go to Greece and you're just. You looked one time and the flights were expensive and you said, man, I just don't know about that. That's expensive as heck. Well, open up Kayak, open up Google, spend five minutes a day checking and you can get a $514 flight round trip to Athens, greece. That's not bad. So all you have to do is put in the airport you want to depart from, put in anywhere, click in the next six months for a one-week or a two-week or a weekend trip and it starts giving you airfares and on the left it will tell you the airline. So if we're going to Athens, spirit is Let me see, let's click on Athens. Spirit doesn't fly there.
Speaker 1:United 514, air Canada 515,. United and Lufthansa are 530. All of those are round-trip flights. So if you click on United, it will take you to the booking site and it will give you all the flights and everything else, tell you how much round-trip flights are, the stops and everything. So that's a pretty cool little tool to get the cheapest airfares you can possibly get. Check on them daily.
Speaker 1:You'll get different airfares, different airlines, but I guarantee you're going to save a ton of money rather than just going to bookingcom or whatever and click on your preferred airline even and just saying I want to go in August and I want to go this week in August. I want to go to Spain. Well, you're only going to see those flights that they're going to give you and you're going to want to book to Spain, where you're only going to see those flights that they're going to give you and you're going to want to book it that day. Try this every day, and you might find some flights that get you some little creative thing going on where you say you know what? I never really thought about going to Tokyo, but for $600 round trip it might just be worthwhile to go spend a week in Tokyo. So that's your tip for this week.
Speaker 1:Stay tuned. I'm going to give you another podcast next week with some more tips on saving money or something you can do on your travels. Until then, safe travels. Hit that subscribe button. Oh, and do me a favor, go to the website and sign up for the newsletter. You get all kinds of cool stuff in that newsletter too, including travel contests and stuff where you win trips. So until next time, take care and safe travels.
