Paynes Prarie

When we were in Gainesville last weekend my mom and dad took us on two fun outings to Paynes Prarie. Paynes Prarie, which is part of a Florida state park, encompasses a huge area of over 20 square miles just south of Gainesville. As we learned on our visits to the park, the area used to be grazing land for cattle and settling land for indians way back, and then later when sinkholes started opening up this turned the area into part grassland and part swamp, which eventually became an area focused on conservation and environmental protection. Today you can visit several areas of the park to view wildlife and a variety of different forest and grasslands. We originally went hunting alligators, but ended up discovering that the park offers so much more.


The shot above reminds me a bit of Texas, actually. The landscape is somewhat barren and flat, but still intriguing. Below is a photo of our group on the first day when we were visiting a baordwalk at the northern end of the park searching for alligators.

An attempt to photograph the grandchildren (minus Henry, who stayed home with his dad) with the grandparents below. John and Jack coincidentally wore the same t-shirt to the park, a keepsake from grandma and grandpop's Jenny Lake store in Wyoming this summer.
We saw over a dozen gators on our trek the first day. Fortunately we were walking above the alligators on a boardwalk safe from the slow-moving animals below.
On the second day we visited an area on the southern border of the park where we climbed the steps of an observation deck to look for larger animals that inhabit the park, such as bison and wild horses. Unfortunately the only animal we saw that day was a bald eagle (still a cool animal sighting) but we had a lot of fun in the visitor's center of the park. Amelia was especially drawn to this stuffed bobcat since she had done a project on bobcats last year in her first grade class.
Cousins sitting together for the obligatory photo in the shot below. From left to right, John (4 1/2), Amelia (7), and Jack (3).