Bragg Family South

The last couple weeks after the government reopened have been particularly hectic for Bragg Family South.  With things back to "normal", we were able to do the business trip/family trip to Charleston, South Carolina, as we planned.  First major stop, though, was at the Georgia Aquarium in downtown Atlanta, on Beth's birthday.  Below, the kids enjoyed the "petting zoo" part of the aquarium, where they let you touch a number of different sea creatures--here were urchins, starfish, and hermit crabs: This is an amazing aquarium, with all sorts of exhibits, including the albino alligator that really impressed the kids: Not everything at the Georgia Aquarium was fish, as you can see Kenny getting a close-up of some penguins: I think my favorite part was watching their big ocean tank, which had whale sharks, large stingrays, and lots of other big fish.  I could probably sit for hours just watching them swim by: Later that evening we arrived a...

Well, the clouds of uncertainty have at least temporarily blown away from Bragg Family South...we weathered the 2+week furlough of the federal government as well as could be expected, and though it was highly disruptive, we are catching up and moving on...  Not all of the last month since my last blog post have been as troubling as the last two weeks...  I was able to get out for a couple days during this period to volunteer on a couple digs, including the one below in a pine plantation in central Arkansas: We were also blessed to be able to join our former neighbor Liz (the state trooper who lived across the street from us for a couple years) and her fiance at their wedding west of Little Rock.  Prior to the afternoon ceremony, we spent a little time visiting nearby sites on the Ouachita National Forest, including the restored buildings of a former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) site: We also visited a park at a nearby reservoir, and as you can see, it wa...

The prospects of getting in one last camping adventure before school and work got Bragg Family South adequately motivated, so we headed south on Labor Day weekend to explore the Natchez, Mississippi area, a part of the region we've passed through but never really spent much time in...As you can tell by the picture above, Natchez is a historic river town nestled on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River approximately 3 hours south of Monticello.  Natchez was one of the earliest settlements in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, being settled by the French (and later Spanish) during the early to mid-1700s.  It has a prominent early (antebellum) American history, too, and we visited a number of sites linked to that, including the impressive Melrose Mansion, which is one of the properties of the Natchez National Historic Park: This mansion was built in 1841 by a wealthy family, and while it was not a plantation in the true sense of the word, it did have the dirge o...