Paine's Prairie Preserve 2

Walking out to the end of the platform, I saw one water fowl. He's in the photo below.  Can you see him?

Maybe this close up will help.  Some.  He's pretty well color coordinated with his habitat.

We got to the end of the platform and gazed around.  The only wildlife aside from the water fowl was this somnolent snake.  He was waiting on something.  Can you pick him out?

Here's a close up of him lurking on the surface.

The last wildlife I saw was this guy and he was so high up that I had no idea what he was.

Then there was the triumvirate - they were really the welcome party, but I forgot to snap them until I was on the way out...

And with that we left the Preserve.  And my curiosity about why there was a pier in the apparent middle of nowhere on the side of the road was satisfied.  [Grammar monitors give me a break on that sentence, please]

Paines Prairie Preserve

On the side of the road on the way to Gainesville is an observation deck at the end of a long wooden pier.  All I could see was a lot of this brown sedge like stuff, then some green I couldn't make out and a pond in the distance with a lot of bird activity. 

Osprey or Ahinga nested on platforms mounted on the light poles lining the highway. 

About 8 people were clustered in one area on the other side of the highway clutching their binoculars.  No idea what they could see.

When we stopped at the viewing platform, I saw this sign and made this picture.  There's something about the image that I like but I can't put my finger on it.  Perhaps it mimics something I saw that I liked very much.

This is the viewing platform.  B&W captures my sense that everything was the same color until the last little bit of growth before the horizon.

Tomorrow:  the wildlife we saw from the platform.

Old Barn

Good company, good times, good food...I had a wonderful weekend.  The icing on the cake? It included the chance to get some shots like this one.

Color

Seems like a good day to share this.  It's a shrub growing by my friend's house in Murphy.  Kind of looks like a butterfly bush, but isn't.

Canoe

Ranger Flea Market, Murphy, NC

I walked out of the first building and looked up.  I had the strangest sense of deja vu and later in the day it hit me: I had seen a photo like this in a Martha Stewart and loved it.  Then I thought "when will I ever see canoes hanging from the ceiling like this?"

Now I know.

NC Mountains

I was able to spend the weekend with two good friends in the NC mountains...I think this photo sums up the weekend perfectly.  I've got lots more to share, I took around 200 photos.

Big Apple

Wanderlust

This is a view of the Arno - I took it when I was on a wonderful vacation in Italy. We were in Florence and I was captivated. I had finally gotten into the swing of being in a foreign place.

This week has been a bit challenging, more so because I have a case of wanderlust and keep wishing I could go back and "finish" my vacation in Italy. There's so much to experience there, I feel like I left before I could get to everything. And for some reason, I keep getting travel related emails: VRBO, Delta, Airtran. And today, a blog I follow written by an expat American living in Florence just really pushed the travel button.

Where do you wish you were?