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Winter Trip - January-March 2019
Florida
Our time in Florida was split between two weeks before and one week after going on a 14-day cruise. Most of our time was spent visiting friends & relatives.
Tourist Attractions
Tallahassee Automobile Museum
Alligator Alley/Big Cypress National Preserve
Pebble Hill Plantation
Tallahassee Automobile Museum
The Tallahassee Automobile Museum contains a lot of cars, some vary rare ones. There are also areas of the museum dedicated to special pianos, specialty dolls and memorabilia associated with the characters the dolls represent, sports memorabilia, boats, and other memorabilia.
There is an area of Batman vehicles, including actual and replicas of batmobiles from the 60's TV show and the movie franchise. There was also a Batcycle and Batskiboat.
Another interesting area contains a replica of the boat from the Humphrey Bogart movie "The African Queen" and a number of canoes with built in motors.
When visiting other auto museums we got carried away with how many pictures we took, so this time we were overly conservative in how many we took.
(Pictures)
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Alligator Alley/Big Cypress National Preserve
Most people refer to the section of I-75 between Naples & Fort Lauderdale in Florida as Alligator Alley. The original Alligator alley is the section of US-41 that runs parallel to I-75 about 20 miles south of I-75. We decided to do the original one. We started in Naples and traveled east into Big Cypress National Preserve.
Between Naples and Big Cypress we stopped at Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park. Walking from the parking area to the park we saw a fairly large alligator sunning just off the parking area. When we came back through, it was still there and some cars were parked less then 10 feet from it. We followed a trail to a boardwalk that goes into the strand. We saw many birds along the boardwalk including a bald eagle that was standing guard outside its nest high in a tree. While we were watching the eagle, one of the eaglets in the nest flapped its wings and the eagle we had been watching immediately flew into the nest.
We drove through the preserve to the Oasis Visitor Center we saw a lot of birds as we went through the preserve. At the visitor center there is a boardwalk next to a channel of water. We observed many alligators, some quite large. We also watched great white egrets and cormorants fishing for their lunch. One of the cormorants caught what appeared to be a six to seven inch catfish, which we were surprised to see be swallowed whole. Inside we talked to a ranger for a while, learning that with the temporary funding of the government they had just reopened the visitor center the previous day. He also pointed out some points of interest and marked them on a map. We retraced our path back the way we came.
We stopped at Kirby Storter Roadside Park. Here we walked the boardwalk seeing just a few birds. We then went to the Big Cypress Swamp Welcome Center. The boardwalk at the welcome center goes along a channel that contains manatees. We were there for a while not seeing any manatees. We were at the end of the boardwalk along with a few other people, the other people and Dale started walking away when Ernie saw a manatee swimming under water. Ernie called out "There's one". The manatee poked his nose out of the water, then came completely to the surface and dove back under. Unfortunately, by the time Dale realized what Ernie had said she only got to see the tail flip into the air then go under. We did see another manatee swimming underwater at the other side of the channel. (Pictures)
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Pebble Hill Plantation
Pebble Hill Plantation is in Thomasville, GA, but we went there from where we were staying in Florida so we are including it in with Florida visits. When we got there we went to the visitor center, paid the admittance fee, received a short history of the plantation, and watched a 10-minute video of the history of the families that had owned the plantation. We were then brought outside to meet the tour guide that would start the tour of the main house.
There are no slave plantation buildings on the property, though the original owners ran it as a slave plantation. About 1850 the original owners had a new more elegant main house built. The original main house burned down except one wing. The current main house was built in the early 1900's as winter home and hunting resort. There are 14 suites in the main house, each suite consists of at least two bedrooms (one for the man and the other for his wife) and a full bath including separate shower and bathtub. Some suites had two full baths. For guest with children there were three and four bedroom suites. The number of bedrooms depended on the gender of the children, if all were the same gender they used a three bedroom suite, if there were both male and female children they used a four bedroom suite. The furniture and furnishings are all family originals. The upstairs suites have been converted into art galleries, featuring paintings and statuary of horses and dogs the favorite animals of Kate Hanna Ireland Harvey, the daughter of Howard Melville Hanna who bought the property 1896. Most of the buildings were built for Kate. Kate's daughter Elisabeth Ireland Poe was an accomplished equestrian and horse breeder, with hundreds of awards she or her horses won. Elisabeth was the last owner of the plantation and had the final updates made on the plantation. We were not allowed to take pictures in the main house, but several pictures are on there website, which you can get to by clicking on the name at the beginning of this article.
After an extensive private tour of the house, no one else was there at the time we arrived, we walked the grounds checking out the other buildings. We were allowed to take (Pictures)
of the grounds and other buildings.
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oct 17 2019