A beautiful day for a picnic

After a few days of cloudy, cool weather here in south Arkansas, the weather forecast finally called for a picnic-friendly weekend. So, we hopped in the van late this Saturday morning and drove over to Arkansas Post National Memorial. This small park is about an hour northeast of Monticello, and we've taken some of y'all here for a visit--it is the site of some of the earliest permanent European settlement in Arkansas, was controlled by the French, Spanish, British, and Americans, saw a brief skirmish during the American Revolution and a larger Civil War battle before fading into history (check out the National Park Service's website on Arkansas Post: http://www.nps.gov/arpo/).

Today they were hosting some memorial service for veterans of foreign wars and some Revolutionary War-era reenactors, so we figured we'd take the kids out on a bit of a history lesson. We joined scores of others at this year's event just in time to see the end of the memorial ceremony (just before noon).

We then went a few hundred feet over to where some reenactors were getting ready to fire a replica Revolutionary War-era cannon, comparable to the ones the Spanish would have used during this period (the Spanish controlled this area in the early 1780s).

I didn't quite capture the moment of fire, but they definitely had put a charge of powder into the cannon to fire it--both Kenny and Beth were a bit scared by the blast. We then went over to other spots where other reenactors recreated other aspects of frontier life. Beth had a close encounter of the chicken-kind (she eventually petted the chicken, which was more than Kenny was willing to do)...

Kenny learned how to get a flat boat up an Arkansas river...

Stephen, well, he mostly rode in his stroller and looked cute. Afterwards, we headed over to their picnic grounds and had a nice little lunch:

and Stephen looked cute some more:

But probably the coolest thing on this beautiful April day was some of the wildlife we saw on our way out of the park--alligators and nutria!! We saw two different alligators in the shallows along the road leading into the park:

This picture was of the first gator, probably 4 or 5 feet long, on the lookout for a meal, I suppose. Perhaps they grab a stray nutria when they can...these introduced rodents are now found throughout the state of Arkansas and across much of the South. They were imported to help with the fur trade, but escaped and now do serious harm to native vegetation in wetland ecosystems. They look a lot like beavers (without the flat tail) or perhaps large muskrats:

The second gator was just down the shore from the first one, and looked pretty similar, except it was slightly larger (perhaps 5 or 6 feet long).

Alligators can be found across most of southern Arkansas, although they are not nearly as common this far north as along the Gulf Coast. They can get very large--we know a guy from Monticello that got one during last year's inaugural gator hunt in Arkansas that got one not too far from Monticello on Bayou Bartholomew that was over 12.5 feet long and weighed an estimated 550 pounds (http://www.monticellonews.net/news/2007/1010/outdoors/)! There are some gators in the Arkansas Post area that are over 12 feet long--we know this because some professors at UAM are studying them for the National Park System. We didn't see those giants, but we were thrilled to see our first gators in the Arkansas wilds...