Britton Hill was the first of four stops on a swing through the Deep South with my mother, who met me in New Orleans. She was picked up by Cousin Zane and given a whirlwind tour of the Big Easy, complete with alligator sausage, while I rented a car and drove to Biloxi, where Zane lived at the time. We ate dinner in Gulfport and almost witnessed a brawl. Florida.

Mom and I drove east after dinner and spent the night in the Malaga Inn in Mobile, an antebellum inn with a triple-decker interior courtyard lined with wrought-iron railings. Supposedly haunted, the Malaga was a fun place to stay in a city that was clearly still recovering from Hurricane Katrina.

From there we headed east into the pine forests of the Florida panhandle. We turned off to see DeFuniak Springs, home to one of two perfectly round natural bodies of water in the world and an old Chautauqua community developed as a resort centered on the springs. The architecture of the shoreline buildings is consistently eccentric.

From there it was a short drive to Britton Hill, located on a gentle rise opposite broad farmland. We took the obligatory photos with the main marker and I followed the short trail behind the marker to the true height of land.

That trail passes a few benches and is relatively unremarkable except for the golden orb weavers: really big, really colorful, and really quite ubiquitous spiders. Most disturbingly, these spiders build their webs across the trail at head level. The unsuspecting hiker knocks into them and brushes off a few “cobwebs” before noticing that the builders are just inches away from one’s eyes. You then spend at least 20 minutes back at the trailhead frantically brushing off your clothes and hair before getting back into the car.