Sunday, November 29, 2009

Christmas Reflections - DeFuniak Springs

We're at the Sunset King Resort in DeFuniak Springs for the week, hope everybody had a good Turkey Day, we didn't, we had a Happy Ham Day instead, we decided to let Honey Baked ham do all the work this year. We may not have a ton of left overs but the good news is that this little town is the home of the PUB Burger so that will beat four days of turkey sandwiches.

The best part of Thanksgiving is that it's one of the few times that the Lions make it to national TV, so we get to watch them win or lose, it's a long standing tradition with Detroiter's. When I was a little kid my dad had season tickets (back when they were hard to get) and we would go to the game while mom put together the turkey feast. It was Briggs Stadium back then and it always was cold and snowing, we would be wrapped up in surplus army blankets with three thermos's one with hot chocolate for me, one with coffee for dad and the third one was a wide mouth filled with steaming hot dogs. I couldn't tell you if the Lions won any of those game or not but I can tell you it was always a great day. Oops, seems like my mind took a little side trip here.



Last night (Saturday) we decided to brave the 52 degree weather and head over to the Christmas Reflections, this is the reason that you have to come through this area during the holiday season. There is a nice park around Lake Defuniak, which is said to be one of two perfectly round spring fed lakes in the world, there is a walking path around the shore line of the lake which is in a type of crater about thirty feet deep and then there is a sidewalk at street level. The shoreline walk is just under a mile and the street level is just over a mile so we walker counterclockwise on the shoreline and then came back on the street level, this allowed us to be sure and see everything. They make the street one way every night and charge $3.00 per person to drive around the lake, we always park and hoof it.

They claim to have something like 6 million light in the display, I can't verify that since I lost count at 2,345,652 we hit a flashing display and I just got confused and couldn't remember if I counter the red light twice or not so I gave up. Maybe next time.

My tripod broke a few months ago and I forgot to replace it so I didn't get a lot of the timed exposures that I wanted but the following pictures will give you an idea of what it's like.

Christmas Reflections runs from Thanksgiving through December 31st and if you ever find yourself in the area during this time it's well worth your time to see it.














Entrance to Christmas Reflections
















My Favorite area, I've named it "The Ghost Cemetery"














Dancer,Dasher,Comet,Vixen, Harry,Joe Fred and someone else.





























The Flying dolphins













Military Tribute


















A typical Christmas living room














One of the few non-light displays














Christmas FLORIDA style











































The best part of this display is while walking around you look across the lake which is so smooth it's like a mirror and see all the reflection of the lights in the water. It's to hard to capture in a picture because of the distance so I guess you'll just have to go see it for yourself.




If you love Christmas lights then you're going to love DeFuniak Springs.

Note: it took about two hours to do this blog today instead of the 20 minutes that it should have, GOOGLE was just putting the pictures and text where ever it felt like it today, so much for what you see is what you get.

2 comments:

Carol said...

Cathy, we were in Gulf Shores bout the same time, still here. I have just started reading this blog, but, we seem to have much in common, we RV, we do family research and we have Michigan connections! Small world!

PalmsRV said...

Carol,

When I read your orphan post at the Genealogy Carnival (my post was about Adelia McCrea)I thought the same thing about combining the RVing and the genealogy. The Lambert's post was a giveaway about Foley! I also noticed that you're a reader of "Nick's Blog;" Jim is a regular reader of that one. Palms-Americana is Jim's blog -- he does the travel and I do the genealogy.

Thanks for posting, Carol!

Cathy