paulahays

Hi, All -- My first couple of days in Louisiana were spent driving around the outskirts of New Orleans with Sandy (Sandy driving), visiting a couple of plantations and enjoying the countryside. The first plantation stopped at, Houmas Plantation, has an outstanding garden and that's where we spent our time as the plantation house didn't look that interesting. The second -- Laura: A Creole Plantation -- is well visited as you can see from the sign. On a good day, hundreds and hundreds of tourists pour through the house and grounds. The poor tour guides were bumping into one another on the day we were there. Fortunately, our tour guide was excellent, quite a good story teller. And there's a lot of story to tell here. By the way, this is where Br'er Rabbit originated. According ... read more

Hi again -- Following are photos taken at Gnomewood Farm, which is owned and run by Noel, a good friend of mine for some 25 years, and her sister Renee. It's located in Covington, LA, almost directly across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, a little beyond where you get off the bridge. Sandy and I spent one of our photo days there. Noel and Renee have been raising alpacas for a couple of decades (give or take) and currently have 21. As you can see, they've just been sheared, a procedure that takes place around Easter each year. The fleece then goes to an alpaca co-op and results, for Gnomewood at least, in clothing -- mostly scarves, socks and yarn -- which they are able to sell. I got several pairs of these delicious feeling socks, ... read more

(For those of you who've already seen these photos and read our story, please excuse me for sending it again. I wanted to get this on TravelBlog so that around 30 other people could see it. And it's hard to mess with the list of people receiving this blog.) ______________________ Dear Friends -- These of some photos of Bob's and my recent Christmas adventure. We both wanted a little cold and perhaps a sprinkling of snow this Christmas, being northerners at heart, so we decided to drive to Arkansas' Ozark Mountains as the location wasn't too far from home and we thought the mountains might help in our cold/snow search. Where we stayed was only 100 feet lower than the highest point in the state. Well, "be careful what you wish for," as they say. We ... read more

Smith Falls and Parry Sound, Ontario are two of our favorite small towns in Canada. The first photo was taken from our campsite in Smith Falls, right on the Rideau Canal. Parry Sound has a cruise ship which takes passengers around the 10,000 islands (give or take a few) in Georgian Bay. We took that cruise some years ago and were amazed by the number of little islands that had just one or two houses on them, pretty interesting houses at that. Note the black squirrel. We saw several around this area although we had never seen them anywhere else. These compost bins were in Algonquin Provincial Park, our next destination. The Ontario park system takes composting very seriously. The last photo is of our traveling kitty cats. They've been traveling with us for the past ... read more

This Butterfly Conservatory is a delightful place. Located at the Niagara Parks Botanical Gardens, it has three levels, a huge assortment of plants and flowers in a lush, tropical setting, and contains between 2 and 3 thousand butterflies depending on the time of the year. At present, the Conservatory has around 45 species of butterflies, mostly non-native according to my cousin, Lyn Atherton, a well known "butterfly person" who looked at my photos. (Lyn is also a "bird-spider-and-other-unusual-bugs person.") These photos are nothing like as sharp as Lyn's photos. But they're the best I could take considering that I didn't have a tripod or a macro lens. It's the colors and designs that I find so wonderful, particularly how the butterflys' colors so often match the flowers they favor. Look at #9 and how that butterfly ... read more