They have a sense of humor at Alligator Alley.

Wesley Moore has more than 200 American alligators at his refuge in the Alabama Gulf Coast. Visitors can hold a young gator (they feel like wet shoes...)

or watch Moore feed them.

But the greatest pleasure to be had in Alligator Alley is to watch these cold-blooded carnivores act like themselves. Granted, in the autumn, that means a lot of lethargic sunbathing.

I also had the opportunity to kayak in Graham Creek today, a brackish creek that leads into Wolf Bay. A north wind and low tide combined to make the water so shallow that one of my cohorts could see a stingray swim across the floor of the creek.

Mullet (a freshwater fish common to the area) would often jump from the water, but I wasn't quick enough to photograph it despite my best efforts.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I love photographing glass blowers. It's difficult to make someone look cool when they're painting or sculpting because the physical process tends to be subtle.

But glass blowers, they're kinetic. They wield blow torches, long rods, clamps and sand that's hot enough to melt your face. It's difficult to not make that look cool.

I visited the Orange Beach Art Center on the Alabama Gulf Coast and got to watch visiting artist Sam Cornman work.

 And what could make this moment of artistic creation more photogenic? How about adding an adorable child or four?

I also went on a dolphin-watching cruise. Captain Bill Mitchell of Cetacean Cruises promises you will see dolphins on his tours. He can do this because the bottlenose dolphins of Wolf Bay are homebodies and will live most of their lives in a 10-mile area.

Granted, just because you see a dolphin (and we saw a lot) doesn't mean you'll snap a good photo of them.

Captain Bill is also a repository of useful dolphin facts. For example, male dolphins don't help raise the babies. But females will have another female that acts as a "nanny." She helps with every aspect of the child rearing, even lactating so the child can also feed from it.

Final thought: King Neptune's is an unassuming shrimp shack that borders a Domino's Pizza, but it has the best gumbo I've ever eaten in my life. It also has some stellar Royal Red shrimp...

and a dangerously delicious fried cheesecake.

Yeah, fried cheesecake.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Today is the 50th anniversary for two of the journalists with me on this press trip.

Happy anniversary Susan and Marshall. Keep shinin', you crazy diamonds.

Once again, Janet Podolak has graciously allowed staff writer Jason Lea to borrow her blog while he visits the Alabama portion of the Gulf Coast.

The Gulf Coast oil spill was a calamity, no doubt. It flowed for three months, released about 185 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and, lest we forget, killed 11 and injured 17.

But what hurt Alabama portion of the Gulf Coast even more than the oil spill was the perception of the oil spill.

Kim Chapman, the public relations manager from Kim Chapman, said from May to August (normally, their peak season) tourism business dropped 41 percent. It did not matter if they had actual oil flowing in or just the occasional tarball.

Chapman said most of the struggles with encroaching oil were finished by the end of July, but people still avoided the area, expecting to find petroleum-choked beaches.

"We went to YouTube to show people. Every morning we would shoot video of the beach and have it uploaded by every afternoon, so people could see what it actually looked like," she said.

Chapman and I spoke in Dinner at LuLu's, a restaurant owned by Jimmy Buffett's younger sister, Lucy. We ate fried oysters and blackened shrimp. (Both caught in the gulf, both tasty.)

(Only fried oysters, French fries and jalapeno hush puppies are pictures. The blackened shrimp got eaten before I could photograph it.)

The restaurant also features live music...

and this beauty. It's called a three-layer margarita. It's lime, strawberry and tangerine flavors tiered in a single glass.

I only arrived in Alabama yesterday evening, so I didn't have much of a chance to see anything but LuLu's, but here's the view from the condominium (provided by Young's Suncoast Realty) in which I am staying.

-Jason Lea

P.S. I love flying through the Charlotte airport for one reason. It has a Jamba Juice. I became addicted to Jamba smoothies when my wife spent a summer in New York. Sadly, the closest one to Cleveland is in Indianapolis.

Trust me, it's not a smoothie. It's Jamba Juice.