The Not Key West Trip, part 4

 You should read all this in order, I think. You can access the first part here, and all the pictures from this trip here.

Wednesday, June 4

 I had the foresight to bring my sunscreen in to the hotel room last night, so before leaving this morning I got all slathered up and ready for a nice day of exploration in Middle Georgia, which is what this gnat-infested area is called by people who have to live here. I went out to find it had rained during the night, but seemed to be clearing. Loaded up the car, checked out, and went down the road to a breakfast place with the promising name of Fried Green Tomatoes Cafe.

 It turned out to be a cafeteria of the soul-food variety. I got myself an assortment of foods, totalling about ten dollars' worth, and a "small" coffee that I could have gone swimming in had it been allowed to cool. I ate half a link of sausage -- the greasiest, tastiest smoked pork sausage -- and half a biscuit, and three slices of fried green tomatoes, which were not the culinary treat I remembered from my youth, and drank my coffee while setting up Google Maps for the day. (I would have gone for the free refill on the coffee had the shop not had only powdered creamer.) Then I packed up my leftovers in a styrofoam box and was off to the Aviation Museum at Warner Robins Air Base.

B1 bomber

This museum sprawls across acres and acres of ground. It has four huge buildings of exhibits, plus surrounding grounds where a number of airplanes and cruise missiles are parked. I spent about three and a half hours in the museum, and only saw three of the four buildings. I decided to skip the Vietnam exhibit hall because (a) I saw all those airplanes on the news when it was happening, and (b) I was tired, and (c) I was frustrated at how hard it is to get a halfway decent photograph in those dimly-lit buildings with nothing but spotlights for illumination. (I have the same problem at car museums, sometimes, but I almost never spend long enough at a car museum to get that frustrated.)

F-111

 The first building contains the gift shop, an exhibit dealing with the Korean War and another covering the pre-World War II efforts against Germany and Japan, like Lend-Lease and the American Volunteer Squadron that flew supplies to China over "the Hump" from modern-day Myanmar. The rest of the museum I did in reverse order, for no particular reason. A large hangar-style building contains a number of spy planes on one side; on the other is an F-111, which was made in Fort Worth when I lived there and so is of some personal interest to me. I'm always surprised by how big those aircraft are. There's other things over there, too, but nothing that interested me enough to try and photograph it, so now I've already forgotten most of it. Mostly, though, I spent a good hour trying to get decent photographs of the Global Hawk drone, the U2 (I gave up on that) and the SR-71 Blackbird. The photos I got have all been pretty heavily edited, by my standards, just so that I can tell what I'm looking at.

 As an aside: there were a bunch of kids from summer camp in the building, all playing with what looked like styrofoam airplanes such as we used to get when I was a kid; but these had all kinds of flashing red and green lights on them. They looked really cool. These boys and girls looked to me to be about the same age as my great-nephew Bennie, and they were having a really great time with these airplane toys; so when I left the exhibit hall I went directly to the gift shop to see if they sold them. They didn't. If anybody's reading this and sees such a thing for sale somewhere....  I'm thinking Christmas, or birthday.

 The other building I went into was all World War II aircraft. There was a very interesting exhibit on paratroopers during the D-Day landings in Normandy, and a huge jumble of the famous planes of that era: a B-17, a B-29, a P-51 Mustang, and so on. There are so many airplanes crammed into that space that I deleted a bunch of pictures just because I couldn't tell what they were showing. 

 After the Aviation Museum -- lunch was another half-link of that greasy breakfast sausage, eaten in the museum's parking lot -- I made a quick stop at an ATM (there are no Chase Banks in Georgia, so I went to a machine that's in the Credit Union system, which I always forget I can access at no charge) and a supermarket for a 2-liter bottle of soda to refill my little drink bottle, and a couple of apples. The prices for these small purchases really make me miss HEB, at which I could have gotten the same things for half the money. And the apples would have been better, too.

 Then it was on to Macon, which at 150,000 people is the biggest Georgia town I'll see on this trip. First stop was Mercer University, to see the statue of their mascot, the "Bear of Terror." My next stop was going to be a glass studio a short distance away, but it turned out to be closed on Wednesdays, so I didn't go. The stop after that was going to be the Rose Cemetery, where a couple of members of the Doobie Brothers (or maybe it's the Allman Brothers; I forget) are buried, but I decided that I had no real interest in seeing the graves of a couple of musicians whose work I never much cared for, despite one of their songs, Jessica, being the theme song for Top Gear. So I skipped that, too, and went on to my next stop of the day, at High Falls State Park.

 This park is an unusual stop in my County-Counting Wanders, in that it's out of the way and in a county I've already been to. But I saw it listed on RoadTrippers, and just the name of the place made me want to go there. I have a special affinity for waterfalls, as you may have noticed if you've read many of these loquacious blog posts over the years. The comments I read said it was just short walk from the parking lot to see the falls. So I went, about 30 miles out of the way, to see it.

The main part of High Falls

 It's a pretty enough place, but I'm damned if I understand why they call it High Falls. The total drop is about 30, maybe 40 feet, over about half a mile. And it's not a plunge type, like Niagara or Cumberland, it's a cascade, a gradual tumble over rocks for a long distance. It reminded me of nothing so much as the equally disappointing (though equally pretty) Pedernales Falls, except that this one actually has abundant water in it. It's right below a dam, which ensures that there's always water for the falls. And the rocks are a different colour. And it's probably two or three times higher. 

The Falls from the other side

 I walked the first trail I came to alongside the stream. There was an overlook (where the photo above was taken) and the path continued, more or less level, beyond that point, but it only went to a campground; so I went back to the highway, crossed the bridge over the stream, and started down the trail on the other side, which goes downhill right along the water. At this point two things happened. First, my knees made it abundantly clear that my days of hiking really are in the past. I made it to the first of three overlooks on that side of the river. I knew I wasn't going to the third one, because I could tell that you couldn't actually see the Falls from there. I'd planned to go to the first and second, but my knees had other ideas, so I abandoned my plan to go on to the second overlook. Even if I'd had something to hold on to, I wasn't sure I could make it down and back. (I hadn't brought my walking stick because it doesn't fit in the convertible; I thought I had my ski-pole balance sticks, but it turns out they weren't in the trunk. They're probably somewhere in the breakfast room back at the house, but I don't think they would have helped. Not enough, anyway, though they'd've been of more use here than there.) Even the Magic Word, Teotihuacán, would not spur me on.

 As I started back to the highway, the second thing happened. It started to rain.

 It was just a light rain, and I made it back to the car without getting completely soaked, and used the T-shirt I'd bought last night at the axe-throwing bar to wipe down my camera. But by the time I'd done that, and checked out the gift shop -- which only had two fridge magnets, one a generic "Georgia State Parks" and the other a "High Falls State Park" design showing three mushrooms; what's up with that? I didn't see a single mushroom in my time there -- the rain was coming down in buckets. The kind of downpour that makes you grateful for fog lines and "Stop Ahead" signs to warn you of intersections. And it continued that way all the way to my next stop, a huge carving of Sasquatch that sits about a hundred yards off the highway in somebody's pasture. There was no place to park near there, so I just pulled to the side of the road and tried to get a picture through the car window. But when I put the window down, a stream of water poured in from the joint between the roof and windshield. So if you want to see what it looks like, check out the photo on the Roadside America listing.

 I finished up the day with a drive to Milledgeville, where I'm spending tonight. (Dinner, eaten in my room, was the rest of my breakfast leftovers, and one of the apples I bought this morning.) This is the home town of Flannery O'Connor, the first Southern Author whose work I fell in love with, long enough ago that I don't actually remember any of her stories. There are a number of sites in town associated with her, so I plan to see some of them tomorrow morning, and then continue with my County Counting. (I've now visited 19 of the 32 counties I intend to go through on this trip), which includes the Pig Monument that I'm so looking forward to. Here's hoping it's dry enough to get a picture!