Paynes Prairie

[mariness]

So I finally managed to get a look at the pictures I took during last week's mini expedition to Paynes Prairie. In the process I found this:





and this:



Neither of which are exactly Payne's Prairie. The first is, I think, from a December trip to Downtown Disney - that is, that's certainly the Lego store in Downtown Disney, but I'm not sure when I took the picture. The second was initially an attempt to take a photo of a very uncooperative bird. (You will note the lack of any birds, cooperative or not, in the photo.

Alas, when I finally reached my Paynes Prairie pictures, I found that most of them had not come out in the slightest. Ah well. Paynes Prairie is a low lying area of Florida that has occasionally turned into a lake; when not a lake (as now), it is, depending upon who you talk to, a complex ecosystem, ideal pastureland, a state park, or a place that my mother and I had been trying to reach for some time. Warning: you can't tell it's a prairie from any of my pictures:



If you look closely, you might see the snakes hidden in the grass.



We saw two white pelicans, neither one of which felt like cooperating for a picture. This was about the best I could do:





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One note: one reason it took me so long to put up these pictures is that although we had been told that Paynes Prairie was wheelchair accessible...this description turned out to be more than slightly misleading. The problem with this sort of thing is that it doesn't just impact the wheelchair user, but the people travelling with the wheelchair user, and it kinda puts a downer on even the loveliest of places.

Luckily, we were able to cheer up with excellent milkshakes, and my parents were able to go look at Heisman Trophies (I skipped that part).

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Lovely pix, thanks.

Did you take these pictures from the chair? (Things look a lot boggier than I'd risk my chair in.)

[mariness]

Yes, although the pictures are a bit misleading in that respect - the lake pictures are taken from a wooden walkway, and with the last picture, I'm at the very end of a concert walkway.

"Boggy" was a good description of other parts of the park, though; even though I was in my manual wheelchair so someone could push me, we couldn't make it through most of the trails, including the trails on the actual prairie, which is why you aren't seeing any pictures of the prairie, even though those trails were marked as wheelchair accessible. There are some trails clearly marked as not wheelchair accessible, which I don't mind, but when you are told that your wheelchair can go to the prairie, and you instead face an angled, muddy trail with a fence at the bottom designed to keep bears in, which, great, but with a door that's only wide enough for a narrow human, not a chair, to slide through...

....since my mother doesn't read this version of the blog and she meant this to be a treat for me, I'll admit here that I wasn't happy.

[mariness]

er, concrete walkway, not concert walkway. A solid signal I need to go to sleep.

[jesse_the_k]

actually I was enjoying the idea of a concrete concert, each little aggregate singing her own tune, with the sand providing high notes and the water a pulsing bass.

bedtime for both of us, I think.

feh, what a drag about the access theater.