Weather: Sunny mid to high 70s
When Jenna and Emily were visited a few weeks ago they turned us on to a really cool website called Atlas Obscura. It’s full of curious places that aren’t in your normal travel guidebooks. Today, we decided to try it out and used it on our road trip to Tallahassee. It did not disappoint us.
Our first stop was to the Airport Cemetery, a small cemetery that the Tallahassee International airport built there runways around. The few graves with headstones mostly face away from the start of Runway 27, with a perfect view of the planes coming in for a landing.
We then went over to the 9/11 Whale Sculptures. Located in the front yard of the artist’s home, the memorial consists of four large whale sculptures (named Glory, Hope, Faith, and Grace), a few small pools of water, some smaller barely-surfacing dolphins and a large American flag. The website says that the reason for the whales was because “they are known as symbols of recorders of time; symbolically, they are supposed to teach us how to honor the sounds of the universe, how to listen to our emotions and feelings, and how to share pain.” I still don’t get it, but it was cool to see.
Our next stop was at the Library Oak Tree Fort Sculpture. a huge sculpture made from the wood of a 160-year-old live oak tree located in the parking area of the county’s main public library that was deemed unhealthy and unsafe and was going to be removed. This was not as obscure as the cemetery, or the whales, but it was cool to check out the parts of the old tree the artist used in making the sculpture.
We left Tallahassee and, on our way back, stopped at Harvey’s Ford Truck Collection in Crawfordville. It’s a collection of old ford trucks lined up in chronological order, dating from the early 1900’s to the mid-70’s. Placed here by Pat Harvey, they had all been used on the nearby Harvey family farm, and lined up by year just to see what they looked like in the correct order.
Tomorrow we’re going to head over to St. George Island for the day. There’s nothing on the Atlas Obscura website for the Island but I’m sure we’ll see the lighthouse, and who knows, maybe somebody there has a collection of pink flamingos lined up.