Down, Down, Down

I drove up to Fort Desoto tonight before sunset. It was pretty clear all day, so I hoped I might be able to get some great pictures of the sun sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. Turned out it was too cloudy out towards the horizon to get that, but I still got some nice shots. The picture above is the silhouette of the flower spike on a Century plant. As it reaches the end of it's life, these spiny plants put up a large stalk that sprouts hundreds of little plantlets, which propagate the parent. It actually takes far less than a century, but the parent plant does die afterwards. The shots below show how the sun sunk into the clouds before it reached the horizon. Oh, well, maybe next time.