March 11-13, 2018 Dead Lakes, Wewahitchka, Florida to Albany, Georgia

Partly cloudy rainy day in the mid 70's.  Good day to relax.

Yellow flower, new spring leaves on a shrub and a field of wild bay lobelia. In the late afternoon we had a heavy under storm. Haven't seen on of them in ages, haven't seen much rain since we came to Florida. John barbecuing dinner in the thunderstorm under a tin roof. 

We are now in Georgia. Here is the bus at Chehaw park in Albany, GA. Chehaw means high ground in the native american Creek language. We drove through mostly rural Georgia to get there. The only town of anysize we passed through was Bainbridge. Here is beautiful historic downtown and their city park with huge oaks with spanish moss and spring flowers.

Welcome to Georgia. This area of Georgia they grow pecans ( pronounced pea-can here) and peanuts.  We passed through Hopeful, GA -a couple signs Hopeful general store- which was closed- Hopeful peanuts and Hopeful Volunteer Fire Dept. I guess you are hopeful they will make it to the fire. We went to Chehaw zoo this afternoon. It is in the same park we are camped in. It is small but nice. Don't feed your fingers to the animals seen in the petting zoo, daffodils are blooming and this red kneed tarantula is in the repile house.

More from the zoo. An alligator under duckweed, azaleas, and flamingos.  Camel, dancing black bear, wisteria and dogwood blooms. 

Waldrapp ibis, black headed ibis, blue winged kookaburra- which is a kind of kingfisher with a larger beak, and meerkats. 

We went to downtown Albany today. There is a bronze statue of  Albany native Ray Charles playing his piano in Ray Charles Plaza. Then we went to the Flint Riverquarium.  that features a 175,000 gallon, blue-hole spring aquarium that is home to more than 120 varieties of aquatic life. two cuttle fish, a bat wing fish, it crawls around on it two fins and some BIG fish in the 'spring'.  

An ornamental bush at the spring with pink tulip looking flowers, close up of the flowers, white azalea and dogwood. I love dogwood because it is an understory bush and looks like a floating cloud under the trees when it blooms. The good news for John is that Albany has a brewery- Pretorius Fields Brewery, the bad news is it  closed early week. The Riverquarium is patterned after Radium spring here in Albany.  It is the largest spring in Georgia. A casino was built by it the 1920's and people came to  take the waters. But there was a fire in 1984 that damaged it, then two different huge floods went though and destroyed it. They had to take it down. So they made what was left of the spring into a garden park. Here it is from above.

The water is a beautiful sky blue. The native indians called it sky water since they thought it came from the sky. Before they discovered the radium in it they called it Blue Hole. A gazebo that has lost it's roof near the spring.

John at the gates at the spring. This lovely sun dappled oak grove with spanish moss is at Chehaw park where we are camped.