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!

  

The Not Key West Trip, part 3

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

 Tuesday, June 3

  The sun came up this morning as the same kind of big red ball that set last night. I suspect it's the red-dirt farming dust gives it that colour. The desk clerk thinks it's pollen, but we have pollen at home & the sun is never that kind of dim red ball. Especially when it's as high in the sky as it was when I saw it.

 Anyway. So I spent about half the day today sightseeing in Albany. Started off with a really good breakfast at a place on Old Dawson Road. Drove up and down Dawson Road 3 times, looking for it, before I noticed that it was on Old Dawson Road, which is a short distance to the south. Cafe was called Eggs Up, and I don't know when I've encountered such friendly service. The waitress was from New Mexico & so we talked about a lot of things Texas and New Mexico have in common. We're both amazed at the trees and the rivers around here, they're both present in such profusion. I had shrimp and grits, which of course reminded me of a certain someone who loves that particular dish ... not that I needed reminding. That someone is on my mind pretty regularly as a rule.

the pond at Radium Springs Gardens

 Took my time over coffee, as nothing opened before 9am and I had left the hotel by 7. Then I went to a place called Radium Springs, which used to be a resort area south of town. The old Casino Building was destroyed in successive floods, tornadoes, tropical storms and floods (again) four times in less than 20 years. It stood for about 100 years before the first disaster hit, and then the second, third, and fourth disasters hit before the repairs were complete each time, and in the end they had to tear it down. (One sign said 27 inches of rain fell in one day; another says 24 inches. I suspect that, at a certain point, three inches of rain just doesn't matter anymore.) But the grounds remain as a nice county park (except for those damn gnats; honestly, they make me feel like one of those children on the African Famine Charity commercials, with flies crawling all over their faces), with very nice groundskeeping and a city park on part of the land, gardens on another part, and two other (separate) parks on the grounds across the road and down the south end. Quite extensive. I spent a pleasant 90 minutes or so checking it out.

 Then I headed into town to see the other sights I'd identified. First stop was the Old Railroad Depot. It was closed. It sits athwart a brick-paved street with streetcar rails down the middle. There are maybe 5 or 6 buildings all told, each turned into a specialty historical site of one kind or another: the railroad museum, a general history museum, the regional archives, a museum of surveying, and so on. All were closed, so I just took some pictures of the buildings and went on to Ray Charles Plaza, which is a monument to a native son who made good. It's in a small park on the river front, very tastefully done, although hard to photograph because of the spacing of things, and the sun's position at the hour I was there wasn't conducive to good pictures, either. 

the Blue Hole exhibit

 Just down the street from that is the Flint RiverQuarium, which gives a good explication of the local water source. There are extensive caves under Albany, water-filled and explored by daring scuba divers. So far they've explored about 3/4 of a mile of caves down to a depth of about 1500', where water flows into the Florida Aquifer. The displays of marine life aren't as extensive as at the Texas State Aquarium, of course, but it's definitely worth the eight bucks (senior rate) to see. There was almost nobody else there, which was a big, big plus. 

 From there I drove to the western edge of downtown to see the local Art Museum. It was pretty much as I anticipated: three small galleries showing contemporary exhibitions. I won't say it wasn't interesting, though: the first gallery was a photographic display to do with Native American culture. About half the pics were taken in the early part of the 20th Century, and the rest were done by Wil Wilson, a Navajo photographer I was familiar with. If it weren't for the obsequiously apologetic dissing of the "biases of his time" when expounding on the older pictures, it would have been a well-conceived exhibition. 

 The second gallery contained acrylic paintings on lace paper by some South African woman. It shows extremely wealthy super-model women in extravagant luxury. That by itself was a little too Kardashian for me, but the video of her talking about the burden of having to spend sooo much time getting your hair and nails done.... It was too much. She's a good example of why we should eat the rich.

 The final gallery was a tiny room upstairs where a local artist's work was juried and exhibited: four ... let's call them tapestries .. of odd cloth remnants in random shapes sewn together. It was supposed to represent skin colours and earth colours. I suppose so, but in the end, to me it was just some random bits of cloth sewn together. It was vague enough to accept any explanation you choose to give it, like most modern art.

 After that I had a nice drive west to Fort Gaines, during which I could listen, largely uninterrupted by the Voice of Google Maps, to Rock of Ages, and notice that the narrator's accent would sound frequently like a gentle southern boy moved to Californie, and then suddenly, and briefly, like a Dame of the British Empire for half a sentence. It was interesting, and slight enough not to become irritating. If only he would fully pronounce the last three syllables of each sentence.

 At Fort Gaines, on a bluff overlooking the Chatahoochee River, which is the border between Georgia and Alabama, there is a collection of log buildings called the Frontier Village. These old buildings were rescued from other locations in the county (Early County, if you care) and brought here and renovated, and for some reason decorated with multicoloured Christmas lights, for the edification of people who had never seen how their ancestors lived in the American South before telegraphs and electricity and YouTube. But it was just the buildings; there was no furniture, no rustic tools or implements, and not much in the way of explanation. I've seen enough of this type of historical assemblage to not wonder about things, but if I had small children seeing it for the first time, I'd have been very disappointed.

 Life on the road was a little frustrating after that. I couldn't get a strong signal anywhere in that part of Georgia, and couldn't get RoadTrippers to load; all I had was a few numbers I'd written on the paper state highway map where I'd highlighted my intended route, and I couldn't remember what those particular numbers signified. So I just set off north on the planned route, looking for what the paper map called Highway 161, where I would turn toward the next county in my excursion; and off I went.

 This is when I discovered that the highway numbers on the map aren't reflected on the actual road. There is, apparently, no Highway 161 outside the imagination of the company that draws maps for AAA. After overshooting the turn by about six miles, I set my Google Maps for the next town and learned that, in Reality Georgia, Highway 161 is known as Lucy Lane for a few hundred yards, and then it's called Cotton Hill Road; there being no obvious reason to make that particular switch. Anyway, got where I was going. By this time it was well past lunchtime, so when I stopped at a C-store to try RoadTrippers again (still no signal; only 4G, which it appears is inadequate for that program) I started to buy one of those awful convenience-store sandwiches, the kind with cheap cuts of mystery meat between two slices of white bread decorated with a slice of indeterminate cheese food; but he wanted eight and a half dollars for that miserable imitation sandwich, so I declined, and wondered yet again when it was that Trump was going to bring the prices down on Day One.

 My map didn't indicate anymore planned sightseeing stops before what I remembered I would see in Cordele -- billed as the Confederate Launch Pad, a Titan missile standing by the freeway -- so I just went on, enjoying the good weather and the breeze in my hair and the doings of Junior Bender on audio, until I got to that missile. Cordele is a big enough town, and on a freeway, so it has 5G service and I could finally consult RoadTrippers, to find that the two things I missed after Ft Gaines were instructions to myself. So I didn't actually miss anything. I went to a diner for a refreshment -- by now it was too late to bother with lunch -- and programmed my next couple of travel legs into Google Maps. In my planning, I'd expected to spend the night at Dawson, about 30 miles northwest of Albany, but I made it farther than that, so now I'm in Warner Robins, Georgia, where there's an aviation museum at the old air base that I plan to see first thing tomorrow when it opens at 9AM. 

 Went out for dinner first thing, and found I was at a sports bar; not just any sports bar, but an axe-throwing bar.  Who'd'a ever have thunk you could mix axe-throwing and drinking? There's a row of targets along one wall, and people stand there with their brews or booze and throw axes. Sure, why not. And there's a trivia game going on at the same time, and between questions, they play really loud music and ask questions about it for bonus points. So I got something to eat and drink and was able to watch the USWNT crush Jamaica. Most of it, anyway; by the time it was 3:0 I was done for the day, so I didn't see the last goal, but only read about it on Messenger when S texted to tell me it had happened. 

 Good enough.