It’s the “coastal living” lifestyle that makes Fairhope feel like home to Baldwin EMC members Brandon and Erin Miller. With a set of six-year-old twins and a shared love of the outdoors, the couple says they can’t imagine raising a family anywhere else.
“I literally grew up on the water,” Mobile native and avid outdoorsman Brandon says. “My dad took me fishing every chance he could until I was about seven years old, when we traded the fishing boat for a sailboat and began spending a lot of time on Fly Creek. I fell in love with the Eastern Shore and knew that one day I would want to raise my children here.”
Brandon’s family moved to Fairhope when he was a teenager and after graduating from Fairhope High School, he left for Auburn University where he met Erin through mutual friends. The couple wed five years later and moved to Baldwin County, where they’ve happily resided for more than a decade.
“It was never even a question that we would move to Fairhope and start our life together here,” says Erin, who works as a child nutrition coordinator for Baldwin County Schools. “There is nothing that compares to life in Fairhope and the Gulf Coast. Brandon wants to be out on the water all the time and so we’ll take the boat out on Fish River or the gulf. We love the people, the schools and the atmosphere here.”
Brandon works as a senior project manager at White-Spunner Construction in Mobile and spends the majority of his free time outdoors. He says the older his children get, the more fun these outings become.
“I actually took my daughter, Caroline, hunting with my dad and me for the first time last fall and she absolutely loved it,” Brandon says. “We have so many natural resources right here, or just a short drive away, it is the perfect place to raise a family.”
“The kids are still so young, it’s fun to watch them develop their unique interests,” Erin says. “But Brandon’s right, we have so many options at our fingertips for them to become immersed in. Whether it’s sailing on the bay, or horseback riding at Oak Hollow Farm, or fishing in the gulf; I don’t know of anywhere else that has all these options, and yet still feels like a community that we want to raise them in. We just love it here.”