Paynes Prairie - Adventures With Alligators... and banana spiders

One beautiful Saturday in September, we decided we would take our first trip to Paynes Prairie. Okay, so it's our second trip, but our first trip was to the wrong place in Paynes Prairie. Sorry, Nathan, there was nothing to speak of there. Except a tower I thought would fall over. If you're curious about that story, click here to read it. But this time, we found the right spot to go view the alligators and were not disappointed.

After parking, it's about a 1/2 mile walk to the viewing pavilion that is set up for your convenience and comfort when looking at gators. How nice. The end of the walk is along this board walk. Nicely raised and caged so you feel more secure when staring at an alligator down in the water. Here is a picture of the daddy and the kids taking a look at an alligator swimming down below.

Here is Jessica taking advantage of the few minutes she was allowed to get out of her stroller. Looking around, checking things out. At this point she wasn't walking, but she could sure get where she wanted anyway.

When you get to the end of the boardwalk, there is a little pavilion so you can sit in the shade and see a lot of alligators. It's apparently positioned in a very popular area for the gators to rest. As we were gazing to our hearts content, we noticed there was a ginormous wasp nest in the roof of the pavilion. We also noticed that the wasps had come down to check us out. Needless to say, we did not make anymore use of that small building. Too bad, it was quite a warm day, too. But leaving the pavilion and walking over into the grass allowed me to get this really good shot of a gator sunbathing. What a relaxing way to spend the day.

On the way back to the car, we first had to sprint through the pavilion. I was quite weary of the wasps by that point. And then walked all the way back along the boardwalk and on a path through some meadows and some woods. This tree was quite interesting. It looks super old. And it is huge. This picture definitely does not do this tree justice.

One other interesting thing we noticed on the way back was that we were surrounded by all these banana spiders hanging in their webs up in the trees above the path. Yuck! We have them all around the complex here where we live, but I think these ones may have been even bigger. For those of you not familiar with these creatures, they are not really aggressive, but they are grossly huge. I'd suppose some of these could be compared to a dollar bill for size.

By the way, I am NOT a spider person, but these are interesting to look at.