Old bunks bolted into place. Heavy crockery stacked behind iron grilles. Narrow staircases that force you to climb sideways. A brig with cold metal bars. Deep inside the USS Alabama, there is even a pin-up calendar permanently opened to May 1944, as though a sailor simply stepped away for a moment and never returned.
Standing on the deck of the mighty battleship in Mobile, with gulls flying overhead and the humid Gulf air pressing against the skin, it is difficult to reconcile the stillness of today with what this vessel once represented.
The USS Alabama wasn’t built for silence; it was built for war. Known as the “Mighty A”, the 45,000-ton battleship carried a crew of nearly 2,500 men during World War II and earned nine battle stars in the Pacific. Today, docked permanently at USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park, it is museum, memorial, and time capsule.
Exploring it feels strangely intimate. The officers’ cabins are modest, the kitchens industrial, the corridors maze-like. I begin to understand how entire lives unfolded inside this floating steel city.
“It’s the details people remember most,” our guide tells us as we pause beside the faded calendar. “The coffee cups, the laundry rooms, the tiny routines. That’s what makes the ship feel human.”
The Alabama’s story mirrors Mobile’s in some ways: layered, resilient and significant. Most travellers racing through the American South stop at New Orleans, overlooking Mobile, a few hours east along the Gulf Coast.
But Mobile deserves a detour. Founded by the French in 1702, Mobile is one of the oldest cities in the United States, shaped over centuries by French, Spanish, African, Creole and Southern influences. At one point, it was called the “Paris of the South”, and traces of Europe still linger in its wrought-iron balconies, hidden courtyards and oak-lined streets.
Long before New Orleans turned it into a global party, America’s first Mardi Gras celebration took place in Mobile in 1703. At the Mobile Carnival Museum, elaborate crowns, sequinned robes, float designs and old photographs showcase centuries of carnival history.
A short walk away, the History Museum of Mobile traces the city’s broader story, from colonial beginnings to its complicated maritime and civil rights history.
But history rarely stays confined to museums here; it often spills onto the plate. One afternoon, I join a food walk with Bienville Bites Food Tour, led by Bella Myers, who speaks about Gulf Coast food with affection, familiarity, and fierce pride.
“In Mobile, the Gulf feeds everything,” she tells me between stops. “You can taste the water in the food here.”
The tour takes me through a delicious blur of Southern and coastal flavours. Fried green tomatoes, crisp and tangy, their sharpness softened by a creamy remoulade. Beignets dusted with sugar and paired unexpectedly with lemon, giving them a bright citrus edge. We end with bread pudding, warm, soft and dripping bourbon sauce.
Mobile’s food mirrors neighbouring New Orleans, with an abundance of Gulf oysters, clean and briny; shrimp that are fried, popped into gumbo, or paired with grits. Myers proffers a few more recommendations of food in Mobile: “hickory-smoked barbecue, fried catfish, Conecuh sausage, and the traditional banana pudding”.
But the connection to the Gulf extends far beyond the plate. The waters that sustain its kitchens also shape the landscape around it. Just outside the city lies the vast Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, often called “America’s Amazon”. Spread across swamps, wetlands, and waterways, the delta is one of North America’s most biodiverse ecosystems, home to alligators, otters, migratory birds and towering cypress trees rising directly from the water.
It’s almost time to leave, but one final local tradition remained: the MoonPie.
The marshmallow-filled snack, graham crackers sandwiching soft filling and coated in chocolate, has been a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras staple for generations. Created in 1917 as a filling snack for coal miners, MoonPies eventually became Mobile’s signature Mardi Gras throw, replacing beads in many parades.
I pick one up out of curiosity and immediately remember Meemaw from Young Sheldon calling Sheldon “MoonPie”. That somehow feels fitting. Because Mobile is a little like that snack: nostalgic, deeply Southern, and far more memorable than expected.