A Few Photos from My Weekend Away

   Hi everyone. Happy Thursday to you.

  You may have read how last weekend my husband and I took a quick little get-away.  My travel intro post is here if you're interested in a trip overview.  Basically, we caught a plane Friday morning and flew to Charleston, South Carolina. The timing worked out perfectly because it was only a 2 hour flight, so we had Friday afternoon, all day Saturday and all day Sunday to explore. We caught an early morning flight home Monday. 

  If you read my intro post, you might remember me mentioning that I have visited Charleston once before. That was 3 years ago when I went with a friend. This time my husband and I did some things I hadn't done before, except for one.

    The only place I wanted to revisit was Magnolia Plantation. They have a large very wild style garden with paths that twist around ponds and through shady southern woodlands. When I visited with my friend, it was early May and I had just missed the azalea blooms. This time I hoped to see them because I remembered there were so many azalea bushes in this wild style garden. 

   When we arrived we went from an April New Hampshire heat wave (about 70 degrees F/ 21 degrees C) to a real heatwave (95 degrees F/35 degrees C).  This had been going on for a while also, so the azaleas had bloomed a bit early. 😞 There were only a few blooms left.

   Most of the bushes looked like the one in the next photo.

  Oh well, we still had a nice walk around the gardens. You can never go wrong with a walk around a beautiful garden. ❤

  Plus, there was some wildlife in the gardens too.

   In fact, we saw several alligators. All the ones we saw were quite small compared to the ones I saw when I visited with my friend.  If there were still big ones there, perhaps they were trying to stay cool in the afternoon heat.

    We also saw this juvenile white ibis eating in one of the ponds. 

    There is something quite interesting about the trunk bases of cypress trees. 

   The water in some of these little ponds was covered in small weeds. With the heat and humidity, this walk felt almost jungle-like. It certainly felt like I was in the South and not in New Hampshire anymore.

   I have another post of photos from my visit to Magnolia. The next post will be a little of an area a little more cultivated. I'll share more soon.