Karen at Fifty Four

I do love a good botanical garden, just like I love a good art museum. Unfortunately, here in Dothan, the botanical garden was almost as disappointing as the art museum. Almost! Maybe in the spring it would have been nice. The rose garden was done very well. There were even quite a few blooms still on the bushes. I love the smell of roses... so much, I think I want to try my hand at growing my own. I had fun with the portrait mode on my iPhone :) That's me, having fun with the timer on my phone. I was able to give myself 10 seconds to run back to the swing and sit before the camera clicked. There was actually a fair number of statues in this garden. This one was my favorite. 

I've been to quite a number of art museums in the various towns I've visited, and I have to say... the one in Dothan was right up there with the worst!! It was very small, but that wasn't what made it so bad. It was the items they had displayed that they were calling art. I know art is in the eye of the beholder, and I'm not trying to say I have any expertise whatsoever, but this looked like childhood things that should have been thrown away long ago, or photographs that should never have been printed, or sculptures that were mistakes.  I always try to select my favorites and then do a little research on the artist to educate myself. Even that was difficult. Many of the pieces were from local artists and the plaques say they were donated by the artist, which leads me to believe they had an art class (like one of those "paint and sips") and they just left their work behind. That's how bad it was!! None the less, I found one that I liked and another one that

Since I was in the area, and the weather was amazing, I took a trip to Florida Caverns State Park in Marianna, FL. Can't compare to Mammoth Caves National Park, in KY, but it was a nice day for a short walk on the trails and cave tour. 

There is a nice, very informative Army aviation museum on Ft Novosel. The exhibits start with early aviation and progresses to the helicopters that served the Army throughout the various wars since Korea and Vietnam. It was actually a very sad trip through history. I read about many pilots who lost their lives trying save soldiers that had been wounded in battle, or saving other pilots and crewmen that were shot down while bring supplies to the soldiers on the ground. A lot of sad, sad stories. I grieve at all the loss and wonder why we glorify wars. This was the start of the timeline through the museum.  Amazing to think this aircraft flew across the English Channel in the 1930's with no navigation equipment and very elementary directional controls; little more than a kite really.  I felt very old when I saw the exhibit on Air Traffic Controllers. The PAR I used at NAS Norfolk was very similar to this one. Ah, equipment I'm familiar with is in a museum!!! Maybe I'll choose

My home away from home for the next three weeks is Enterprise, Alabama, whose town mascot is the boll weevil (an ugly little beetle). Weird, I know. I always associated the boll weevil with the destruction of cotton crops causing bankruptcy for farmers in the region. Why would this town celebrate the boll weevil?!!    Well, turns out that the destruction of cotton farms lead to the planting of peanut crops. This is a positive development because cotton actually destroys the fields and leaves them devoid of nutrients for future crops. The peanut doesn't. So, not only was the introduction of the peanut crop the savior of the farmers financially, be the savior of the soil.  Statue on Main St commemorating the Boll Weevil. As for my observation of this little town in southern Alabama, not much to see. My Airbnb is a basic 50-year-old house in a middle-class neighborhood with a Publix and a pizzeria down the road. I will never return unless work mandates it. It's actually not terrib

I had a free Saturday afternoon so I thought it would be the perfect time to visit a new art museum in Orlando (new to me, that is), the Mennello Museum of American Art. It was a very small art museum, only six galleries, and two of those were actually just hallways with a few paintings hung. But is was nice, none the less. They even had a sculpture garden on the property. That was also small, I think I counted less than a dozen sculptures, but the grounds were nice and it had the benefit of a lake as the back drop. Every time I go to a museum I like to select my all time favorite of the trip. This time it was Newell Convers Wyeth's Buttonwood Farm , 1920, oil on canvas. The colors and the contrast don't come through on the photo as they do when viewing it in person. The blues and the greens immediately attracted me. Many of the American landscapes in that gallery were of the west and were quite dark. This one called to me. The Buttonwood farm, it turns out, is a real place. It