This weekend Mark and I went to St. Marys to celebrate our 21st anniversary.

St. Marys is a small, peaceful town just north of the Florida state line. I kept trying to find the perfect time and place to take some pictures for the pages designated “Anniversary” in the scrapbook I’m working on. After dinner on the last evening, we found some swings near the docks and decided we would come back the next day (when it would be much hotter, of course) with my camera. The lady who took the picture declared it was perfect. No picture of me is ever “perfect” but I will concede that it is good enough.

That said, I believe I did take a picture this weekend that is, due to God’s amazingly detailed creativity, actually perfect. After leaving St. Marys we drove west to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. This place caught my attention several years ago but because my children think they are too old for field trips, we have never gotten around to going there. I was looking forward to an exciting boat ride on the swamp and seeing hundreds of alligators. Mark says he saw one. We did see a dead cotton-mouth snake which was very close to the boat. The guide said it would likely not be there much longer seeing as alligators see snakes the way kids see spaghetti. Enough said.

Although the majority of the animals were hiding from the hot, hot sun, the lily pads were still open and were a beauty to behold. Using the shotgun approach of taking lots of pictures with hopes of getting at least one good one, I wasn’t disappointed. Just for the record, this was taken with a Canon Power Shot A580 which is at least six years old and has proven to be worth every penny of the $150 I spent on it.