Savannah plays softball

Yes, 5 year old little girls do play softball.  The school, where she will go next year for kindergarten, has different sports and this is softball season.  They usually have a 6 and under team but there weren’t enough girls so she is on a team that’s 8 and under.  There are 3 girls who are 5 on the team.  Tonight she got her first hit and made it to second base before the team got out. 


She was out there on second base doing the potty dance! They got her a runner and she took off for the bathroom faster than she ran to 1st base after her hit!!

Ready in the outfield. Waiting for that ball to come her way!! And playing catcher with coach. 
The way this works…the girls pitch 4 pitches and then the coach comes in to throw to the girls.  They must swing at those pitches.  They get 4 tries.  Savannah isn’t really catching but standing beside the coach who is catching. 
I was really impressed with the coaches out there tonight. It didn’t matter which team they were on, all the coaches told all the girls what great jobs they were doing.
Of course a visit to Virginia isn’t complete without a trip to Brewster’s for ice cream.

Stone Mountain

We went to Stone Mountain today.  There is a very large park there but we went mainly to see carving and the museum. 
We saw a short film about the men who did the carving.  In 1916 the Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned Gutzon Borglum to start the carving.  It started out to be just a carving of General Robert E. Lee. He abandoned the project in 1923 and later went on to complete Mount Rushmore.  Augustus Lukeman continued the work until 1928 when work stopped for the next 30 years. In 1963, Walker Hancock was selected to complete the carving, and work began in 1964. The carving was completed by Roy Faulkner.   Stone Mountain is solid granite and the carving process employed many local stone workers from the area quarries.
The finished carving now depicts three Confederate leaders of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (and their favorite horses, "Blackjack", "Traveller", and "Little Sorrel", respectively).
Here is a picture of the mountain and a close-up of the carving. 
        


Another good day.

Fishing -- Lake Lanier Georgia

Ed was fishing off the shore this morning and a little later ended up going out on the lake fishing.  Seems our neighbor here had a boat and invited Ed to go along.  Didn’t take him long to say…..”hell yeah”!!
He had a wonderful time and finally caught a Bass.  In fact, between the two of them they caught about 13 fish.
 

We are out on a small peninsula here at our site so it wasn’t far to go down to the dock when they came back to get these pictures. 
Here is our campsite.
           
This park is very nice and we will keep the information on file in case we ever get by here again.

FDR’s Little White House

We took a detour today to Warm Springs, GA to see FDR's Little White House.
Roosevelt found Warm Springs in 1924 when searching for relief from polio. He came there to swim in the springs naturally heated water. He love the area so that he built a simple cottage while running for president in 1932. This area of Georgia was a rural farming community, and he spent many hours visiting neighbors and learning of their difficulties especially since the beginning of the depression. These visits gave him insight to the lives of the average families and helped him develop New Deal policies such as the Rural Electrification Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps (I had a uncle who worked for this project in upstate New York).
We couldn’t go inside the house today because they were filming a new documentary film.  But we did tour the museum and could walk down and I was able to get this picture of the outside of the house.  It was not a very big house.

Roosevelt died here on April 12, 1945 while posing for a portrait.  Here is a picture of the unfinished portrait just as the artist left it.   Later the artist did indeed finish the portrait by memory. 
                   
Nearby is Roosevelt’s Warm Springs Institute.  He founded this institute for people suffering from polio.  They could come and enjoy the same relief he got.  Since the Salk Vaccine was approved in 1955, polio is no longer the focus of the institute.  They now help all people with different disabilities, teaching them to become self sufficient adults and the museum hires many of them. 
It was a good stop and is worth the 60 mile detour off I85. 

USS Alabama

Today we went to Battleship Park. This is where the USS Alabama is located and they also have a submarine, the USS Drum. There are also a lot of other planes and small boats. But the USS Alabama is what we went to see and boy did we see it. It was a three part self guided tour. Everything is well marked and you follow along with a map. We spent about 3 hours on this ship alone!!

Ed was a radio man in the Navy, so he always looks for the radio room. This is where he would have sat with headphones on, listening to the morse code and typing the message.

Taken from the bow those are some big guns!!

This battleship fired over 1,250 16 in (410 mm) shells on the enemy during supporting bombardments, shot down 22 enemy aircraft and never incurred any damage due to enemy action. She earned the nickname the "Lucky A" because they never lost a single man due to enemy action.

We then spent some time walking around the different aircraft they had there before going on board the sub. I had an uncle who served in the Navy on submarines. He was over 6 foot tall and it always amazes me to see the tight spaces on these old subs and wonder how he ever made it.

It was a good day.

Bellingrath Gardens

Yesterday we went to Bellingrath Gardens. This morning I loaded all the pictures and then proceeded to hit a wrong button and deleted them all! So here’s a list of the blooming flowers from their webpage. There are 3 different tours you can do at the gardens. The house, gardens and a river cruise, or you can just do the gardens and the river cruise, or you can just do the gardens. We opted just to do the gardens, since we have been done several other southern home tours.

It was a beautiful day and the walk in the gardens were very nice however, we were a little disappointed in it. Every botanical garden we have ever been in always has little signs identifying the flowers and trees. This garden did not have them. Guess I should have taken this picture along with me. We saw mostly Azaleas. If you don’t take the tour in April you wouldn’t even see them. Even yesterday the blooms were starting to drop. It just seemed that they weren’t keeping up these gardens along the walk. However, the closer you got to the house, there were pretty fountains with seasonal plantings around. This is where they had all the Easter lilies and some other spring plantings.

Ed is off to play golf today and tomorrow we plan to go to Battleship Park to see the Alabama.

Livingston City Park

We have discovered a city run park in Livingston.  Today we went there to play the small 9 hole golf course.  It was a challenging course with a couple of par 5 holes and a couple of par 4 holes.  I have not played golf in a longgggg time. I didn’t do very well but I did have fun.  Maybe I would play more if we could find small 9 hole courses. 

The park also has a pool, tennis courts and playgrounds.  They also have a half mile walking trail.

Maybe we will go back tomorrow to play again. 

Beautiful Weather in Livingston

We have been having beautiful weather here in Livingston. Days have been sunny, at times a little breezy, with the nightly lows in the high 50’s – high 60’s which make for wonderful sleeping.

We’ve taken care of some doctors appointments and still have a few this coming week. Ed has been playing poker with some of the guys here and played golf at the small 9 hole course the city maintains. I’m even going to go attempt to play golf with him one day next week. We’ve washed the motorhome once…might do it again before we leave here since the pine trees here are in bloom and yellow pollen is all over everything.

This is our site here at Rainbow’s End. It a very large site the backs up to a wooded area. We really like this part of the park, called the Hill Section. (Don’t know why its called that…the whole park is flat.) We are close to the activity center and its just a short walk to the clubhouse and to get our mail. And the laundry room is also very close.

Hope everyone has a wonderful Easter. We are just going to be relaxing today watching golf and later this evening….BASEBALL opening day….RED SOX vs YANKEES. GO SOX!!!