In May of 2004 we headed to North and South Carolina to visit with my family. We didn't really take all that many photos, but here's what we have.

There is a nature preserve where you can drive around and see alligators. There's one right there...

Zoomed in a bit. Not very exciting. I think that's the secret to having your species exist for a few hundred million years -just chill out.

The Coast Guard uses this old-timey ship for training cadets. Here in Savannah, they were lined up like a bucket brigade, passing supplies onto the ship.

Savannah has this neat bridge in the background.

You can see the tugboat, and off in the distance a whole bunch of cranes used to lift freight containers off of cargo ships. It's a pretty busy port.

This is the rotunda of the Capitol in Raleigh. I guess I'm spoiled here in Austin, this building was pretty small.

(but very nice.)

If you ever go to Raleigh, be sure to check out the science center. It's free, and it's one of the best ones I've been to. The fact that it is free blew my mind. They've got tons of fossils, aquariums, dinosaur skeletons, you name it. It was a blast.

One of the unique things was the butterfly room. They have this room that you walk through and it is jammed with butterflies. They were everywhere. They're rather hard to get a good picture of, but here one took a rest and we snapped its photo.

This was about the best I could manage.

That guy down there has no idea that he is about to be eaten by that Tyrannosaur skeleton! Don't worry, it worked out OK. The guy was later able to just slip out between the ribs, and bolt from the room. My camera malfunctioned and I missed those shots...

Here is a Brachiosaurus with some sort of skin ailment. Often the curators of these museums like to use the exhibits to tell a story. My guess is that he was on his way to the dermatologist when he was captured then stuffed and put into the science center.

Blue whale skeleton. It swam by before I could focus, so I just got this shot of its rear.

This was at the plate tectonics exhibit. All those little purple dots indicate seismic activity of some relatively small magnitude. That one with the yellow circle around it indicates that there was major activity, like over 6 on the Richter Scale. Is that St. Louis? I can't tell exactly where it is.

That's it. Thanks for reading.