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+I was not a fan of Dauphin Island. The beaches are nice enough, though nothing like what you'll on the other side of Mobile Bay, in Florida. The ocean is brown here, from the rivers I assume, but you can't help feeling that it might be, as my daughter put it, "because Alabama is dirty?" 
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+Left to our own devices we'd have stayed one night and moved on, but unfortunately we'd already made plans to meet up with some family who were nearby on trip of their own. So we stuck it out for four days and I couldn't help but notice a few things in those four days.
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+If you need any firsthand insight into the advantages of turning land over to federal management -- currently very unpopular -- head to Dauphin Island. There is no federally managed land on Dauphin Islands. Observe and then head over to Gulf Islands National Seashore, which as the name suggests is managed by the National Park Service. 
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+Forget the part where the non-federal owned one is covered in houses and garbage while the federally owned one features relatively pristine beaches without a house in sight, all I want to contrast are the facilities and what you get for your money. For $28 in Gulf Islands you get a nice clean, level camp site with 50 AMP, 30 Amp and 20 Amp hookups, along with good fresh water and a spacious picnic table. Every day at 9 AM ranger comes and cleans the bathroom. This more or less the same as every other national park in the U.S.
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+For $42 a night at Dauphin Island Park & Beach Board you get a tiny sliver of land that hasn't ever been leveled, will more than likely have giant roots you'll need to navigate and a picnic table so small my three children under five barely fit on one side of it. You'll be able to spit tobacco juice from your front door onto the side of your neighbor's RV. The electric service will max out at 30Amps and stop working at the first hint of rain. The last time the bathrooms were cleaned at Dauphin Island RV Park Jimmy Carter was president. The beach, which could be quite nice, will, inevitably, courtesy of your neighbors, almost every single one of whom will be from Alabama, be covered in trash, beer cans and whatever refuse happened to be used while said neighbors were at the beach. Because to an Alabaman Alabama is nothing so much as a giant trash can.
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+This actually extends from top to bottom from what I can see. Not only is trash everywhere, it gets celebrated in exhibits. About 25 percent of the local aquarium is more or less a pro-oil propaganda exhibit that spends most of its time highlighting all the ways in which oil can be cleaned up without ever showing a single picture of what an oil spill of the size of the Deep Water Horizon disaster actually looks like when it rolls ashore, nor mentions the devastation it has done to the local fishing industry which as more or less gone belly up and had to sell out to multinational corps since the accident. It's so breath-taking one-side that you notice it.
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+I could actually forgive all of that, but the icing on the cake is the locals. The locals are the tired locals you find at tourist destinations that have been used up, hollowed out and left to rot. I've seen places like this around world and the attitude of their residents is always the same, bitterness born of self loathing. Now, I met some of the people they have to deal with, I'm not saying the locals don't have their reasons, but if you live within a tourist-based economy and you resent, if not outright hate, tourists, you also essentially hate your world and that's no way to live.
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+That's also Dauphin Island in a nutshell. It's a place that has been chewed up, spit out and left there on the beach to rot in the Alabama sun. 
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+Of course it's not like we sat around miserable the whole time. As you can probably tell from the pictures we had a pretty good time. It's not the worst place on earth after all, but there's certainly many better in this world and we couldn't wait to get to them.