The Wuhan Botanical Gardens

Last week Babes was out of school for the National Holidays.  I was pretty excited I had a whole week with my cutie patootie, all by ourselves (not only was it a holiday, but DH was out of town)!  I had plans to be girlie, but first we set out for exploring.  I've been wanting to go to the Botanical Gardens for awhile now, Babes loves flowers and it seemed like just the place for her.  After checking on my trusty Google Maps, I decided NOT to take the bus (2 1/2 hours!  YIKES) and decided to drive myself (24 minutes!). Well, let's just say that between construction and non-existent roads it took us 3 hours to get there.  Babes was great, she was pretty patient, only pulling out her old lady of endless suffering routine once or twice.  What was so endlessly frustrating is that we were really RIGHT THERE, circling around it for over an hour!  A left instead of a right and we could have saved ourselves so much pain.  But that's neither here nor there.

The gardens are stunning!  We were unfortunately not in the right season for a lot of flowers, we must have just missed the lotus blossoms, and were a little too early to smell the Osmanthus, but the gardens were quiet and ethereal none the less.  I wish I was a better photographer, the late September light, as it slanted through the trees and sparkled off the water was inspiring.  I kept expecting to run into a fairy or sprite as we wandered through the trees and across the bridges.

And oh!  The bridges, if I were a painter I'd exclusively paint bridges.  I love the symbolism of the bridge, spanning the space between.  You are not on water, you are not on dry ground, but somewhere in between.  Every bridge, every pavilion we came across seemed prettier than the last.  I can't wait to go back again (hopefully this time with better directions).

Oh, and one good thing about getting lost, we found this awesome bridge just outside of the butt end of the Moshan park.  Supposedly a rebellion was put down on this spot with a skillfully placed arrow, and they built a bridge to commemorate it.  The archer though is impressive, it looks as if he is rising up out of the water to fire an arrow into the heart of the mountain.