Laurel is one of the most dynamic people I've met. She must have noticed that I don't handle doing nothing well, so she blitzed me with activities. By the time we finished our paddle and lunch, she still had another place to take me for most of the afternoon. Before we left, we had time to take a little break to give the animals time to take their midday naps, and to allow us to get over lunch. Then we drove a few miles from her house to Botany Bay Plantation Heritage Preserve/Wildlife Management Area.
The road to it is one of the most photographed roads in the state. I, of course, had to take a few more photographs of the beautiful trees arcing and interlacing over the dirt road. I used my fish eye effect to make it even more round.
We started by visiting the bird feeders at the office and the surrounding vegetation. The best bird there was a female painted bunting. Then we went to the site of an old plantation house. The house burned down but an ice house remains. It was one of the prettiest buildings I've seen.
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| Honey bee working the rampant wisteria |
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| Laurel at the door to the ice house |
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| One of the views I admired |
After driving around the refuge, looking for birds, and enjoying the views, we went to the beach. It has a boneyard, where the ocean is flooding out trees. A few are still standing, but many are laying on the ground. Some look like works of art. I amused myself, while editing the pictures, by making several versions of this one. This is the posterized version.
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| Tree roots in the boneyard |
People are not allowed to collect any shells or artifacts here. So people pick up the shells and then use them to decorate sand houses, attach them to trees, or arrange them on the fallen trunks of trees.
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| Shell - decorated tree |
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| Wilson's plover racing the waves |
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| Anemone in world's smallest tide pool - a rotted piling |
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| One of these is not like the others - all are growing on downed trees |
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| The day's most perfect shell - a knobbed whelk - I snuck its picture out |
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| Day is almost done and so are we |
Thus ended the first day of my visit with Laurel. And a fine one it was.
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