The world keeps a running list of seven wonders.
Ours are smaller. Stranger. A couple of them are, if we’re being honest, a short drive outside the city limits. But every one is the kind of place you end up telling people about later — usually starting with, “so there’s this fiberglass Stonehenge in the woods…”
Here are the seven. Addresses and hours included, because half the wonder is actually going.
1. Bamahenge — Elberta
There’s a particular kind of Alabama drive where you start out thinking you’re just going somewhere normal. The road gets quieter, the pines close in, and then — without much ceremony — there it is: Stonehenge, standing in a clearing near Elberta. Not England. Not a theme park. A full-scale henge in the woods, about 35 minutes from the house.
Bamahenge was built in 2012 by Virginia artist Mark Cline, commissioned by marina owner George Barber, which explains the scale but not the feeling of stumbling onto it. The replica stands 21 feet tall and stretches 104 feet across, aligned to the summer solstice — because if you’re going to put Stonehenge in the Alabama woods, you may as well commit. The stones look ancient from a few steps away, weathered and solemn. Then you knock on one and it answers back hollow. Fiberglass, shipped down on four flatbed trailers, painted to look like something that’s been puzzling people for thousands of years.
The best part is how little explanation there is. No admission booth, no gift shop, barely any signage. You walk in, look around, and supply your own commentary. Then the place takes another turn: tucked into the same Barber Marina woods are full-scale dinosaur sculptures — a T-Rex among them — plus a giant coiled snake that feels like someone added a punchline and walked away. Strange, generous, and completely unbothered by whether you understand it.
Where: Near Barber Marina, 26986 Fish Trap Road, Elberta, AL. Free. About 35 minutes from Group Retreat Fairhope. Plan on 15–20 minutes, longer if your group includes kids or anyone who likes saying “wait, what is that.”
2. The Storybook Castles — Fairhope
On a quiet residential street just off downtown stand two hand-built stone castles — turrets, arched doors, the works — sized somewhere between a child’s dream and a gnome’s country estate. Known locally as the Storybook Castles (the Sheldon and Mosher castles), they weren’t built for any reason grander than delight, which is exactly why they belong on this list. A fairy tale you can park next to.
They sit on private property, so admire them from the sidewalk and keep the magic neighborly. Bring a camera; nobody has ever regretted it.
Where: 457 Oak Avenue, Fairhope, AL. A private residence — view respectfully from the street. Free.
3. The Lucky Horseshoe — Fairhope
You’ll spot it from the road: a giant lit horseshoe arching over the entrance, five minutes from the canal. Inside, on Friday and Saturday nights, locals line up to learn to dance. You don’t have to be good. You just have to show up — the lesson comes first, the social dancing after, and the whole point is that everyone starts somewhere.
It’s honest fun, and a genuinely good night out for a group that wants to do something other than sit on a porch (as excellent as our porch is).
Where: 9115 US-98, Fairhope, AL. Line dance lessons Friday & Saturday, 6:30 PM, followed by social dancing. $10 at the door. 21 and older.
4. Good Time Charley’s — Foley
A short drive down toward Foley buys you a microphone and a crowd that has heard worse. Good Time Charley’s takes karaoke roughly as seriously as scripture — which is to say, wholeheartedly and with zero irony. If someone in your group has been threatening to sing all week, this is where you let them.
It’s a little out of Fairhope proper, but the best nights usually are.
Where: 17714 US Highway 98, Foley, AL. Karaoke on Saturday nights — check their Facebook for the current lineup and times.
5. The Fairhope Tea Plantation — Fairhope
America’s oldest tea farm is hiding down a lane outside Fairhope, and it’s older than the competition by a proud eight years. The story is pure Gulf Coast: in 1979, Donnie Barrett was clearing debris after Hurricane Frederic and came across the remains of an abandoned Lipton tea experiment at the local Auburn research station. He and his father salvaged a few tea bulbs, planted them, and never quite stopped. Today there are more than sixty thousand tea bushes, tended by hand.
Tours are by appointment only, and delightfully small — the group size is capped by the number of people who fit on Donnie’s golf cart. You’ll get a cup of tea, an education, a ride through the rows, and a tea plant to take home. Call ahead; that’s the toll.
Where: 12424 Lyter Lane, Fairhope, AL. Tours by appointment only — call (251) 928-0919 or (251) 209-3089. Private property; no drop-ins. Group tours limited to about three (golf-cart capacity).
6. Page & Palette — Fairhope
A bookstore since 1968, Page & Palette long ago became something closer to downtown Fairhope’s living room. Yes, there are books — good ones, well chosen. There’s also a coffee counter, a full bar, live music in the Book Cellar downstairs, and “yoga and wine” on Saturday mornings, because Fairhope contains multitudes. It’s the kind of place you wander in for a paperback and leave three hours later having made friends.
Right on the corner of Section and De la Mare, it’s the anchor of an afternoon spent doing nothing in particular downtown — which is one of the finer things you can do here.
Where: 32 S Section Street, Fairhope, AL (corner of Section & De la Mare). (251) 928-5295.
7. Cammie’s Old Dutch — near Fairhope
Rome has the Colosseum and its gelato. But you don’t need Italy for ice cream — not with Cammie’s Old Dutch around the corner, scooping dozens of homemade, melt-in-your-mouth flavors.
The backstory is as good as the sundaes. The shop began in 1969 as Widemire’s Old Dutch, and Cammie Wayne started working there at sixteen. Years later she stopped in with her two small children to show them where she’d had her first job. The owner, Mr. Widemire, was sitting at the counter. She asked, half in passing, when he was going to retire. He said he was looking for a buyer. She said she’d take a look — and she bought it, on one condition he insisted upon: the place would always and only serve ice cream, never food. She’s kept that promise, and grown the business many times over since. It’s a small-town story about a first job that became a life’s work, and you can taste that it’s tended by someone who cares.
Where: 9555 County Road 24, Fairhope, AL, in the Barnwell community. Dozens of rotating homemade flavors.
The eighth wonder
Here’s the secret the other seven are really about. Fairhope was dreamed up in 1894 as a utopia — a single-tax colony founded by idealists who named the place for the “fair hope” that the experiment might actually work. It mostly did. What they left behind is a town that still aims high, and that somehow keeps collecting the delightful and the strange: a fiberglass henge, gnome castles, a tea farm born of a hurricane, a bookstore that does yoga.
Maybe that’s the real wonder — a whole town that aimed for paradise and mostly pulled it off. The other seven are just the proof.
You can see all of them across a long weekend, and come home each night to a house on the water in the middle of it all. That’s what we do here at Group Retreat Fairhope — point our guests toward the good, strange, wonderful stuff, then leave the porch light on.