January 26-27, 2015 Ocean Springs, Mississippi to Alabama

We went to the Walter Anderson art museum today. Walter is a famous artist from Ocean Springs. He painted what he saw in area. He was eccentric, schizophrenic they said, but made beautiful art. Very cool patterns and colors.  He spent a lot of his time on Horn Island, one of the barrier islands off the coast, camped by himself drawing and painting.

He did this  wood carving of a swimmer, below is the murals he painted on the walls of the community center-now part of the museum. The two photos to the right are details from the center’s murals.

 

This room was found in his house after his death in a locked room. One of the residential streets in Ocean Springs. Beautiful live oak trees.

  

After the Walter Anderson art museum we visited the Moran art gallery. John is not related to them as far as he knows. Joe Moran is a well known artist from the area, his children now paint and run the gallery.  There were paintings of ships and scenes from around the area. Ocean Springs used to have a medicinal hot springs called Marble springs.  All the houses drilling wells around it lowered the water table, so the springs stopped flowing. Here is part of where the pools were.

The next day we moved to outside Moss Point, Mississippi and stayed at a Harvest host site at Gulf Coast Gator Ranch. Harvest host allows us to stay at a number of small winery’s, farms etc for one night free. In exchange we partake in whatever the site has to offer. The Gator Ranch is 400 acres that have been in the family for generations. They harvest alligator eggs from their land, raise the alligators and release them back into the swamp. They also donate gators all over to zoos and schools etc. They support themselves with a ‘gator walk’ and airboat rides. We did both. Here is the bus at the Gator ranch.

John is pointing too where the waterline was when Hurricane Katrina came through. It demolished their area. They have now rebuilt, but the gator walk is shorter since Katrina took out the boardwalks.  Before Katrina they had 170 alligators that they were raising. When they came back after the hurricane there was only one left. As you enter you are greeted with a number of signs. Please watch your children with a picture of a gator with a child in its mouth. Caution do not extend arms over the railings, Warning Alligators can jump for food, please keep your hands off the fence and railings. Kind of scary.

We saw the baby gators first. They only grow a foot a year so these are about a year or so old. Then we saw the big guys enjoying the sun.

 

We were the only ones there for this ride, so we got a private tour. Cliff our guide grew up here. He has been wrestling gators since he was 13. He is now one of the famous gator boys from the show on TV. The boys capture unwanted alligators from waters around the area, like from peoples backyards. They also wrestle them. He has also been in some documentaries. Sounds like he has a pretty busy filming schedule. We learned a lot about alligators and the swamp from him.

 

Here we are on the air boat. We had to wear the yellow ear protection when the boat was running, it is pretty loud but it moves very fast. Cliff was a pretty acrobatic driver too. It was a beautiful sunny day, about 70 degrees.  And yes we did visit Boudreaux the Zombie Gater. He like all the rest was just laying around. Gators don’t do much but lay around.

 

We took advantage of the really cheap diesel in Mississippi before we headed over the border into Alabama. We visited our friend Barbara Cash in Grand Bay. We met her and her husband Terry on the Blue Ridge Parkway in their motor home. They have long leaf pines growing in their yard-needles about 15 inches long and they sent me a huge box of them when I started making pine needle baskets. We visited them last time we were in Alabama and restocked my needle supply. This trip we found out that Terry had just passed away after an extended battle with cancer. Very sad, but Barb seem to be doing well. It was nice to visit with her and we collected a few more needles. Dauphin Island is also in the area so we visited there. It was late in the after noon. When we arrived at the Historic Fort Gaines it was closing so we didn’t get to tour it.

 

Most of Dauphin Island is a bird sanctuary maintained by the Audubon Society.  It is a barrier island off the coast. We walked on the beach for sunset. It has lovely white sand, sea oats , long leaf pines and lots of shore birds.

      

There was a prescribed burn in the sandhill crane refuge that we visited last week so there was lots of smoke in the air. It made sunset very colorful. Natural gas has been discovered in Mobile bay area so now there are a bunch of oil wells off the coast.