Discovering Bellingrath Gardens

or ... Serendipidiously Traveling  (by Connecting the Pieces & Adding Dots.....   ;-)

Vaughn is a jigsaw puzzle fanatic and she did her share of puzzles in 2020, the year of the Covid!  It started before CV19 with a large puzzle I bought for her to do in our travels to Costa Rica.  She had done one the previous year and it had been saved under a piece of glass on the coffee table of the rental house in Pavones.  It was a 2000 piece whimsical beach scene that was fitting for our hilltop setting overlooking Golfito in the Pacific Ocean in 2019.

So, I found her another 2000 piece monster from the coast of Italy.  It was one of the picturesque cliffside villages in Cinque Terre.  It is one of those places you hope to visit someday.  (It was planned at one point as a group trip but cancelled). Well as it goes these puzzles take a few days, maybe a week or more, and during that time pieces are found on the floor or other odd places.  They migrate on a sweaty arm or in a piece of clothing.  Well I found a particularly errant piece on the wooden grate in the shower!  It was ruined, just cardboard, no image left, soggy.  In the end, I colored it red and fit it in the finished puzzle.  That colorful puzzle is now under the glass on the main coffee table for all to enjoy.

So, it should not be a surprise that I stocked up on jig saw puzzles as we decided to self quarantine at our dirt house in Florida last winter.  This series of new puzzles from Amazon helped while away the time as we watched the world from our bunker.  One puzzle in particular caught my eye as it’s lighthouse scene reminded me of the 15 years of our life experiences on the beach in our cottage on Lake Michigan.  (With our first two Lances as guest quarters).  It stayed together on the table much longer than normal.

https://community.lanceowners.org/topic/puzzling-passtimes  gives some photos.

With that puzzling introduction the serendipity story begins!  I opened a cardboard box in the dungeon of our dirt house recently and found an old stack of 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles that have been put away for many years, likely since the nineties and our lives at Little Point Sable in the cottage by the Lake Michigan lighthouse.  These puzzles are actually much older though as evidenced by the price tags from Pamida & Ben Franklin.  And priced from just a $1.49 to $2.89!  These were apparently puzzles purchased in the Copper Country in the 1970’s when we lived near the shore of Lake Superior.

What’s funny is that they are not really familiar puzzles.  “Maybe I have done that one before”.  So, I teed up one for Vaughn to do and she got through it noting it was a little harder than she thought it was going to be for her.  As we looked over the other puzzles, I remarked about where they were from.  Some were marked with a location but others were not, just titled something like “Quiet Harbor”, the one she just finished.  With some investigating we found a german flag....

So when I looked at another, it was titled Bellingrath Gardens.  We both thought it looked like it was from Europe.  A large palatial garden, paved stone courtyard and brick mansion with ironworks.  With a little help from google I determined it was actually from Alabama!  Who would have thought?  That immediately added a dot to our travel planning map.  I have put 100’s of dots on that map this past year, creating lists like campgrounds, waterfalls, lighthouses, architecture, National Monuments, etc.

It turns out Bellingrath Gardens seems to have an interesting history.  It started out as an old fishing camp on Mobile Bay.  Bellingrath bought the camp in 1917 after making his fortune bottling Coca Cola and some other ventures.  His wife started planting the 65 acres and with time the gardens grew and a house was planned to replace the fish camp cabins that they used.  It’s a very interesting story nicely chronicled here https://youtu.be/MDPZD61szx4.   It became a local destination.

What was particularly interesting to me was that much of the house was designed and built in 1933 using recycled materials from buildings in Mobile!  Bricks from major demolished buildings & paving stones that had come from ballast in ships!  But the ironwork was of particularly interesting history.  In the mid 1800’s wrought iron became a popular building material.  We have walked the blocks in New York to look at the iron facades of the famous district.  There are approximately 250 cast iron buildings in New York City, most of them in SoHo and mostly built from the mid-1800’s through the late 1800’s.  Carnegie Steel?

This ironwork material has been well integrated into this Bellingrath home.  We now have a new stop along the way and are looking forward to seeing this indoor/outdoor museum in person.  It took a 50 year old forgotten jigsaw puzzle from Ben Franklin for $1.99 and a little internet work but it  is now a neat recycling project that we can go see.  We will know later, in a day or three, whether all the puzzle pieces are still there!   (It was!)  Based on sharing this story, the dot count increased with the Castello de Amorosa, a recommendation by the SIL after I sent her my musings.

Serendipity .... the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way ... thus we are Traveling Serendipitously!  (Another puzzle in the pile happened to be Washington’s Headquarters  at Valley Forge that we had just visited last fall).  And I will add that a lot of travel information has been gleaned from many LOA members along the way.  Thanks!

Serendipitous Itinerants !   We head to Bellingrath this morning.......