Magnolia Plantation

 After touring Drayton Hall, we went down the road and toured the Magnolia Plantation. The house at Magnolia had been destroyed during the revolutionary war, rebuilt and is now restored. It was beautiful and was surrounded by beautiful gardens. I'll get to that later.

This photo of Ben and Sara is blurry so I can't enlarge it, but I liked it so much I couldn't delete it.

 The greeting party at Magnolia included a number of peacocks.

Peacocks are so strange to me, 

beautiful from the front and naked looking on the back.

This guy posed nicely for me.

 Pretty civilized peacocks who expect to be fed at the table!

 It was fun to take this tour with Ben and Sara.

 Around the outer parts of the plantation, things were a bit spooky-looking.

Sara loved the swampy areas!

 Our guide told us this site was used in the old movie, Swamp Thing.

I will say that I do NOT want to go swimming there!

 I was intrigued by these little stumpy things around the bases of these trees.

Friends from the South, what kind of tree is that and will those little

things grow up to be more trees?

To me, they kind of looked like little gophers surrounding

the base of the trees.

 I know these birds are perfectly fine birds

but don't they look a bit evil?

I was about to delete this photo, not because it was so bad 

but I took soooooo many photos, editing is necessary.

Thankfully, I decided to enlarge it just in case I was missing something.

And there he is, a baby alligator!

We were told there were some really big ones there in the ponds

but they were elusive on our tour. This little guy showed up for us, though.

We then moved in closer to the house, touring the beautiful gardens.

This is pretty, don't you think?

There's the house.

Nice, huh?

Poor Ben and Sara.

I made them pose until they were sick of it.

We were touring through an area called the romantic gardens.

The original home was destroyed in 1780 by the British.

That was a long time ago!

Ben and I braved the garden maze.

Sara waited outside; I was

confident she would rescue us if we couldn't

find our way out.

It got a little frustrating at times

but it was kind of fun.

I followed Ben for awhile then we went our own ways.

Thankfully, we made it back to each other at the end!