Bellingrath Gardens

We met up with friends from Colorado at Bellingrath Gardens near Mobile today.  The gardens and weather were beautiful.  The six of us ate lunch at the gardens and I highly recommend the trio salad.  I had an excellent shrimp salad and two broccoli sides salads for a mere $7.95.

Now some photos from the gardens:

This flower is partially in bloom.

Same flower with no blooms.

Galen, Elize, Frances, and Neil.

Karen, Elliot, Frances

Neil and Galen

Elliot, Frances, Neil, Galen, Karen, and Frances

This snake was at water's edge and we were told it is a water moccasin.

A closer view.

The snake was on the ground in front of that person to the left of the bridge.

Elliot and Galen

The boardwalk.

Elise on the bridge.

Another snake - this one in the grass.

Note the boardwalk to the right.

Week's Bay

This is amazing!  I am updating the blog with photos that I took not a month or even a week ago but today!

We went to Week's Bay Bog hoping to find pitcher plants in bloom.

We found boggy water.

And pretty little red leaves but no pitcher plants.

Thanks to new knees, I was able to walk the entire boardwalk this year.

The remains of a squirrel dinner.

The boardwalk led us out to the Fish River.

Galen checking out the river.

No pitcher plants yet but it was certainly a lovely morning for a walk.

Pensacola

Larry, Lu, Galen and I went geocaching in Pensacola yesterday, discovering things about Pensacola along the way.  We found six caches, ate fried green tomatoes, took photos of pelicans, walked on the Palafox Pier, and stopped at Joe Patti's on the way out of town to buy fish and shrimp.  It was a fun day.

Galen under a piece of artwork in downtown Pensacola named "Homage to America".  It is tribute to those who lost their lives on 9/11.

Homage to America from the other side with the courthouse in the background.

There was one of these for each branch of the service but this was the only one wearing a life jacket and beads.

A real pelican taken at Plaza de Luna.

Pensacola Bay.  Photo taken from Plaza de Luna.

Great place for buying fresh fish and seasfood - a huge variety of it.  Need seasonings or frozen turtle meat, or anything else along those lines you can think of?  They have that, too.

Inside Jo Patti's.

Tenshaw Delta Boat Trip

A group of us took one of the 5 Rivers Delta Cruises on this boat.

The nutria is not native to this area and is quite destructive.

Nutria have chewed down all this vegetation.

Osprey

Osprey Tree

Sandpipers

Cormorants.  It is still too cold for alligators so except for the nutria all the wildlife we saw today were birds.  We were told about a night time summer trip where they shine lights on the shore and see many, many red eyes - alligator eyes.  If I could stand the heat and humidity, I would love to see that.

A different view of I-10.  This stretch of the interstate is part of the Bayway.

This looks like a sandy beach but the beach is actually made of shells.  It was a good place to catch shellfish and people would eat and then discard the shells where they sat.  They did this for hundreds of years and eventually those shells became this beach.

We just scratched the surface of the delta on this trip - a fascinating area you could explore for years.

Plantation Parade

There was a fun little parade in the RV park this morning that went right by our house.  Galen threw some of our beads that we got at the Foley parade to them but they threw even more back.  :-)  I can't help but wonder if they got their beads at other parades and recycled them like we were trying to do.

Daisy wasn't in the parade but she was certainly pretty enough to be part of it.