A great day!

Saturday was Daniel's birthday. And we decided to celebrate it just the two of us. This has been a busy quarter for Daniel at school and with me taking a class, we don't see each other as often as we usually do. So, we decided to take Saturday off and play. 

Our day started early (Ramses decided that 5:30 was the proper time to get up), but it was a cool morning and we enjoyed it on our back porch with birthday waffles and a fire in our chiminea. Frankly, life doesn't get much better than that...

Later in the morning, we went to visit Oatland Island Wildlife Center, which is really close to us and we we'd never visited together. I had been there once with visitors, but for Daniel this was new.

It's a fairly large wilderness area with trails through woods and across marshes and with large enclosures housing animals native to Georgia.

The weather was perfect as you can see!

And the views stunning - I can't believe we live in a gorgeous place like that!

We even found a few signs of fall.

And some stunning colors in nature.

We both loved this old structure - what great texture and color.

Now, as to the animals, we saw a few ibis,

all of the wolves (I'm glad Daniel had the close-up lens on the camera so we could get some good photos),

the bison,

and of course alligators, which are everywhere around here. This one was a baby - you can still see the stripes.

Another one was much bigger, but quite peaceful around all the turtles in this pond.

It must not have been hungry.

Now, when we were looking at the turtles, Daniel started talking about how wonderful it would be to have a turtle that could just live in our back yard.

He'd been mentioning this on and off for a couple of weeks, but on Saturday it sounded like he really, really wanted one.

And guess what happened? We went home and while eating lunch on our back porch, Daniel spied this beautiful little visitor who had found his (or her) way into our backyard. Daniel was like a little boy who had gotten a pony for his birthday.

Can you believe this happened?! We were stunned! And just loved it!! We are not sure if it's still in our backyard or if it has moved on, but it sure made Daniel's day! Thank you, little turtle.

In the evening we decided to have dinner in one of our favorite restaurants by the beach and then go for walk barefoot in the sand.

The day had been warm, but it sure cooled off at night and walking into the water felt a little cold at first. But hey, it's mid-October and we are at the beach - how great is that?!?

And, to celebrate this special day the sky put on a show that had us speechless.

A perfect day!!