We needed to get out and about this weekend. Sometimes I tell Military Man, Honey I need to "just get out of Dodge." I have no idea what movie that line if from, my parents use to say it. Anyway, I needed to get the kids out of the house and I needed to get out of the house too. So I opened up our Florida State Park book and we chose some fun things to do. Military Man loved archaeological stuff. So he chose to take us to Crystal River Archaeological State Park. Its a six mound, 61 acre Pre-Columbian Native American site. The visitor center has really cool artifacts like arrowheads, pottery and tools that were found in the mounds. There is a Temple mound, Burial mound, Midden mound (garbage dump) and huge worship rocks (which I forgot to take a picture of)
This is the tallest mound. Its called Mound A. Its the back side of the mound. Really creative huh? Its made of Oyster shells. The river is an oyster estuary. They estimate that there were about 10,000 seasonal Indians that used this meeting place. The time this was occupied by theNative Indians was around 500 B.C. to 100 A.D.
This is the stair case to climb to the top. The Indians has a spiral sloping ramp that circled the mound. Think
of the top of an ice cream cone. The ice cream top, not the cone.
This is the top of the Ice cream cone..or also known as Mound A. See the giant oak trees growing out of the top of the mound? I don't think the Indians intended it for that, but it was some nice shade. It overlooks the Homosassa River. Because the mounds are so old, Thousands of years old, they are not really that impressive. You look at them and think, "Hmm, looks like a big grassy hill". And your not allow to climb them, so the kids were not at all impressed.
Next we visited Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park. Here is Stinker Bell on the top of an 11 foot crocodile that lived in the park. His name was Jake. There are alligators in the Park that have missing limbs and tails thanks to Jake.
They have lots of animals that can no longer live in the wild that are enjoying a good life. I am thinking of donating my two monkeys to the park. They don't have any monkeys....yet.
We happened to come at the right time. Feeding time. This woke UP all the animals and they were running around their habitat watching for the feed buckets.
This is a Great blue Heron. He is called a fly-in, or a MOOCH. He figured out that living in the wildlife habitat is a heckofa lot easier than finding his own food. So everyday he flys in from his perch and tries to steal some yummies out of the feed bucket.
This is Lula and she is having lunch. This is the only reason she ever leaves her giant fresh spring fed watering hole.
After the animals, the kids were starving and HOT. So mama had a fantastic idea.
First of all you know if your family is hungry and grumpy you are not having a good day. But we planned ahead. We packed a cooler full of snacks and drinks. Talk about saving yourself some money.
At the end of the afternoon, we went to the beach and let the monkeys play in the water and cool off. I am still learning to take better pictures. By the time we got to the beach the day was very overcast and I put the flash on. It washed out all the pictures with the water and white sand. This is Diesel Boy on the Jetty. He is posing and making silly faces, but that might be hard to see with the wash out.
So what did you do this weekend? This is Girl Schmuck signing off. Over and out.
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