A garden and a forest October 13-14, 2020

We are blessed to have a wonderful spot on Mobile Bay where we can enjoy the quiet,

the breezes and the sunsets, which is what we did on Monday evening.  We spent all of Tuesday at the wonderful Bellingrath Gardens here in Mobile. I mentioned in my last post that we saw debris from Hurricane Laura on our way into Mobile. In fact, the damage was from Hurricane Sally in mid September. The gardens came through the hurricane well, but lost a number of big trees, and

Boat dock at Bellingrath. We sat here for a while-delightful!

cleanup is ongoing. There were very few visitors at the Gardens on Tuesday, which made it feel as if these were our own personal gardens. 

On Wednesday, we headed for the nearby Blakely State Park, the site of the last major battle on the Civil War. Some remnants of battlefield operations remain including the Confederate redoubts that cross the park. We use the All Trails app where we found a loop that would take us around the perimeter of the park. Fortunately I downloaded a map of the loop because we later discovered that this was a conglomeration of many trails in the park. As it was, trails were very poorly marked. We

started out on the trail, and had gone about a quarter mile, when we were reminded that we were back in the moist south. Mosquitoes were everywhere.. We had come prepared on our trip with bug repellent wipes. Unfortunately for us, those wipes were back at the RV. We turned around, went back to the car, and drove back to the RV (about 10 minutes away) to get them. We had gotten so used to hiking out west that bug repellent was not on our radar, but we definitely needed it for this hike. 

Back on the trail, we noted lots of tree damage, but not necessarily entire sections of forest. Most damaged trees were snapped in two, and there were many of those. Since the loop we were following was a joining of several trails, we followed the Alltrails map, similar to following a trail of breadcrumbs. At one point, it wasn't clear where the trail was that we needed to follow. We finally discovered that the trail had been buried in storm debris. After picking through that, we finally got back to the trail.

It was a spectacular day, and mid-afternoon, we stopped in the middle of a field and sat in the shade of a giant live oak tree to eat our snack. It was a lovely, peaceful moment.

We head back to Florida tomorrow, with a stop in Ocala before we go home on Friday.