One-tank trip: Albany, Ga.

Seventy-eight years after his birth in Albany, a life-size likeness of Ray Charles slowly revolves in the city’s Riverfront Park. Forty-seven years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed here, the new Albany Civil Rights Institute Museum commemorates the movement he helped inspire.

Meanwhile, a gopher tortoise named Malcolm X and a 50-pound alligator snapping turtle named Big Al swim through the Flint RiverQuarium, and cheetahs, lemurs, zebras and black bears roam the natural habitats of the Parks at Chehaw. The Albany Museum of Art boasts a large African art collection, and Thronateeska Heritage Center’s new Wetherbee Planetarium projects faraway galaxies onto a giant dome “sky.”

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WILLIAM SCHEMMEL / Special

A revolving monument to music legend Ray Charles, born in Albany, sits in the southwest Georgia city’s Riverfront Park. The city has an array of attractions for lovers of history or nature.

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WILLIAM SCHEMMEL / Special

A giant turtle sculpture at Riverfront Park offers big entertainment for kids. Albany combines its ties to the Flint River with its place in the history of the civil rights movement to provide plenty of ways to inform and entertain tourists.

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All this, in a friendly, easygoing style, makes “All-benny” — as some “Albanians” call it — a memorable one-tank trip just 185 miles southwest of Atlanta.

Rebirth of a river city

In 1994, the downpour from Tropical Storm Alberto overwhelmed the Flint River and flooded much of Albany. In the deadly disaster’s wake, the Downtown Riverfront Master Plan was created to resuscitate the devastated downtown area. The Flint RiverQuarium is the centerpiece of the rebirth. It includes a big-screen theater, play areas, colorfully decorated Ninja Turtle sculptures, the Ray Charles Plaza and downtown’s first new hotel in more than a half-century.

The Flint RiverQuarium’s 75,000-gallon, 24-foot deep Blue Hole, which re-creates a natural river spring, teems with life. Sliders, cooters and other turtles swim through the clear water and sun themselves on rocks and logs that jut above the open-air spring. Largemouth bass, 5-foot-long gar, 50-pound catfish and other freshwater fish and amphibians drift through underwater caves and partially submerged cypresses and live oaks. Native birds, herons and egrets nest in the branches. Visitors view it from topside and below through a 25-foot window.

Separate galleries house juvenile gators; Malcolm X, a lumbering gopher tortoise named for a red nail polish “X” painted on his head by a woman who found him burrowing in her garden; and Big Al, the Flint RiverQuarium’s lovably homely big-beaked alligator snapping turtle. Another gallery traces the sometimes-cantankerous Flint River from its headwaters near Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, more than 250 miles across Middle and southwest Georgia, through Albany, to its junction with the Chattahoochee River to form the Apalachicola River, which flows through the Florida Panhandle into the Gulf of Mexico.

In Flint RiverQuarium’s Discovery Caverns, kids play interactive games, make their own weather, change a river’s flow and crawl through a cave to find creatures that live underground. A new outdoor aviary is home to injured egrets, cranes, cormorants and other birds.

Imagination Theater, across from the aquarium, is a large-format movie theater, with a changing schedule of marine science films.

Hometown hero

Although he lived in Albany for less than a year after his birth on Sept. 23, 1930, Ray Charles is rightfully hailed as Albany’s most famous native son. The crown jewel in Riverfront Park is Ray Charles Plaza, featuring an illuminated bronze statue of the singer/songwriter, who died in 2004. The sculpture by Andy Davis of McDonough depicts Charles playing a baby grand piano, wearing his signature dark glasses. The sculpture sits on a rotating black pedestal above a fountain and reflecting pool. Recordings of “Georgia on My Mind,” “What’d I Say,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and other hits drift across the plaza.

Civil rights history

The Albany Civil Rights Institute keeps the spirit of the 1960s crusade alive. Every second Saturday of the month, at 1 p.m., the Freedom Singers gather in Old Mount Zion Church to sing the freedom songs and shout the protest slogans that inspired the Albany Movement, which began in 1961, when Albany State University students marched on City Hall to demand the right to vote and the end to segregated facilities. The troupe is led by Rutha Mae Harris, who was jailed three times. Now 67, her rich, alto voice is just as compelling as it was when she was a 21-year-old student. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed here twice for his part in the movement, and he left thinking it a failure. He might change his mind if he walked through City Hall today and saw the offices of mayor, city manager and police chief, once held by white segregationists, filled with African-Americans, reflective of the city and Dougherty County’s two-thirds majority black population.

Century-old Mount Zion Church, which hosted mass meetings in the ’60s, has been preserved as a landmark, attached to a new

$4 million civil rights museum, financed through a voter-approved sales tax increase.

Holiday festivities

From the day after Thanksgiving to Jan. 4, the Parks at Chehaw will be transformed into the Festival of Lights, with drive-through light displays, a Christmas train, Santa’s workshop and an ice-skating rink. Visitors have the opportunity to “walk though the woods” and view Chehaw’s natural habitats, home to black rhinos, black bears, red wolves, gators, zebras, bison, African cranes, reptiles and birds of prey. Visitor favorites are ring-tailed lemurs that scamper through a grove of trees, three cheetah sisters that zoom after a lure with blinding speed, and a cypress swamp where more than two dozen gators float through the dark water like ironclads with eyes. A companion recreational park has RV and tent campsites, play areas, hiking trails, a stocked fishing pond, BMX bike track, boat dock and picnic areas.

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE

Albany is about 185 miles southwest of Atlanta. Take 1-85/185 to Columbus and U.S. 280/82 to Albany.

ATTRACTIONS

Flint RiverQuarium. 117 Pine Ave., 229-639-2650, www.flintriverquarium.com. Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Sunday 1-5 p.m. RiverQuarium $9-$6.50, Imagination Theater $6-$4.50, combo $14-$10. Free for ages 3 and younger.

Parks at Chehaw. Ga. 91, 2.5 miles northeast of the city, 229-430-5276, www.parksatchehaw.org. Daily 9 a.m-5 p.m. Adults’ park and zoo admission, $7.75-$4; campgrounds $17 daily; Festival of Lights $12 per car; $20 per passenger van; $30 per bus. Ice skating $5-$7, skate rental $3.

Albany Civil Rights Institute Museum. 329 Whitney Ave., 229-432-1698, www.albanycivilrightsinstitute.org. Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m-4 p.m., Sunday 2-4 p.m. $6-$3.

WHERE TO EAT

Pearly’s Famous Country Cookin’. Owner Pearly Gates’ diner is Albanians’ favorite place for a Southern breakfast or meat-and-three lunch. The lines are usually long but worth the wait. 814 N. Slappey Blvd., 229-432-0141.

The Catch. Grouper, flounder, snapper, salmon, oysters, shrimp, crab, clams and other fresh seafood, beef and chicken and a full bar draw big crowds of Albanians and visitors to this casual fish house about 10 minutes from downtown. 1332 Whispering Pines Road, 229-446-2235.

Riverfront BBQ. Across from Riverfront Park, the spacious former warehouse is where ‘cue fans come for pork sandwiches and platters, ribs, chicken, Brunswick stew and other staples of the barbecuing arts. 105 W. Broad Ave., 229-888-4647.

INFORMATION

Albany Convention & Visitors Bureau. 112 N. Front St., 229-317-4760, www.visitalbanyga.com. Through Dec. 31, the Wet and Wild Getaway Package, starting at $90, includes family of four admission to Flint RiverQuarium, Imagination Theater and Parks at Chehaw, and overnight accommodations.