We Drove to Florida--er Georgia

At 7:30 this morning I was sitting outside, drinking my second cup of coffee, listening to the birds and watching the sun come up and hit Lake Seminole. The temperature was 67 degrees. If I were still living in our stick house in Centennial, the temperature would have been 33. No wonder we are living here on the road.

Monday morning we left Alabama and drove to Florida, to the East Bank Campground on the shore of Lake Seminole, a Corps of Engineers lake in Georgia and Florida. We have never spent the night in our RV in Florida, so we were looking forward to adding that state to our map of places where we have been. Unfortunately, shortly before we drove into the campground, we encountered a sign that said we were going into Georgia! We will have to wait till Sunday to add Florida, I guess.

Monday night there was a beautiful sunset over the lake.



Yesterday morning I was delighted to see this Great Blue Heron feeding along the water's edge.



Sunday, on our last day in Alabama, we drove to Dauphin Island. That is one of the major areas being impacted by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. From the shore we could see several drilling rigs that are still in operation.



The beaches have beautiful white sand.





People were out enjoying the sun and sand.



At the same time, boats and other equipment was assembled, waiting for deployment to clean the sand if the oil slick arrived.



As we drove onto the island, we saw these booms floating in the surf, hopefully able to keep any oil away from the beach.



And then we saw this stuff at the edge of the water. It looked like a kitchen scrubby, but is really a special kind of boom meant to catch any incoming tar balls, like had been found the day before.



While we were on Dauphin Island, we toured Fort Gaines, built in 1821 to protect Mobile Bay. It was the center of an 1862 Civil War battle, when Admiral Farragut of the US Navy was reported to have said, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead."



As we crossed Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, we have driven over miles and miles of bridges. We thought it was expensive to build interstate highways in the mountains of Colorado. Building them across the swamps, bayous, rivers and bays of the southern river deltas must cost even more. This is the bridge from mainland Alabama to Dauphin Island.