May 22-23 2012 Warm Springs, GA

We went to Warm Springs hoping to soak in some springs. The only pools we could soak in were in the basement of the rehab institute. It was so beautiful outside we didn’t soak. Franklin Delano Roosevelt started coming here after he contracted polio to take the waters for a cure. The waters felt great, he could stand for the first time in three years in the water, but did not cure him. He ended up buying the springs and creating the Warm Springs foundation for the care and treatment of fellow polio victims who could not afford such medical help. They got physical therapy and learned how to live while disabled.  When he became president he built the little white house as a vacation home and to use as ‘the little white house’.

The little white house.  A lizard on a rock outside.

We went to the museum first. These are some of the canes he received as gifts. Here is the bathing suit he wore in the springs.

This wishing well started the march of dimes, if  you put the dimes in this well, they went to the Warm Springs foundation.  The walk of state flags and stones.  The stones were cool. Some were shaped like the state, and some had inscriptions.

 

FDR was posing for this portrait in the little white house when he had a stroke and died. The portrait was never finished. Here are a couple programs developed under his administration.

a gardenia blossom. A magnolia tree, they are evergreen and grow in the wild here.

Magnolia blossoms. Top one is opening and the bottom one is all the way open. A wheel chair made from a kitchen chair.

 

An iron lung. The photos behind it are of custom braces that are made here. The warm spring pool. It is so old and fragile they don’t keep water in it. There is a wheel chair ramp, narrow rails to help patients walk into the pool, and in the back some of the apparatuses used for the patients. The patient would lay on the table, head above water and the physical therapist sat in the chair and treated the patient.

Georgia Hall, the welcome center for the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. Much of it is still used today for rehab from strokes and spinal cord injuries. The old rehab pool at the institute. With many of the treatment apparatuses. In the front is a lift for the patients who could not get into the pool them selves. I learned more about polio than I wanted to know. Including that it is not wiped out yet, it still alive in some other countries.

Sunset over the RV park. John told the GPS to take the shortest route to Callaway Gardens, and it took us on Georgia Red dirt roads.

Memorial Chapel at Callaway Gardens. The stained glass windows depict scenes from pine and hardwood forests as well as the four seasons of the year. This is the back window of the chapel.

 

The front window and the fall window

Maybe the summer window?? and a detail from the back window

iris and some kind of exotic bleeding heart

elephants and big begonias

John petting the lion. He thinks it is a poodle. Koi feeding frenzy

patterns in leaves and bananas

ferns from behind the waterfall and cool light on an agave.

Wax myrtle trees. All winter I was seeing these bare trees, chopped off at the top, I wondered what they were, this is what they turned into. John trying to teach the mallards to jump.

begging turtles, Callaway gardens has this huge azalea garden. Unfortunatly they were done blooming, except these guys

They also have a big rhododendron garden, and they were done too. I found these red guys. Me with a big leaf magnolia. The leaves get up to 25 inches long.

an eastern tiger swallowtail on a wild phlox blossom. We went to the butterfly pavilion, but it was disappointing. It did not have hardly any butterflies. We saw more in the wild. Carnivorous  pitcher plants.

Lizard tails and a phaon crescent on a black eyed Susan.

John on the Lady Bird Johnson wild flower trail. A wild rosebay rhododendron on the Mountain creek lake trail. It was wilder and longer than the other trails. I walked thru some poison ivy that had encroached on the trail!

Ebony jewel wing damselflies. The male in the top is iridescent in the sun, the female is on the bottom.