The Not Key West Trip, part 5

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

Thursday, June 5 

 So here's how my day started. I slept through the night from 10PM to about 5AM for the second night in a row. That hasn't happened in a long time. That's the good news.

 There was no coffee in the hotel office. I checked out around 7 and stopped at a convenience store on the way to the Lockerly Arboretum (which opened at 8AM). They had no coffee. I stopped at the next convenience store, about a half-mile down the road. They had coffee, but nothing to sweeten it with, and only powdered creamer. I tried the next C-store; again, no coffee at all. At the fourth attempt, they had all the equipment, but it wasn't plugged in, as they had no actual coffee to put in it. The fifth stop, they didn't offer coffee at all. At the sixth try, the store (with the word "COFFEE" painted in large letters on the eave of the shop) wasn't due to open for business for at least another week.

 Finally I found coffee at a Jet C-Store. It was outstanding coffee. My day was saved. 

kudzu close-up

I drank it while standing in the apron of their gas station, contemplating the amazing quantity of kudzu, a fast-growing invasive species of vine, on the hillside behind the store, and seeing how it was overtaking all the trees and utility poles on both sides of the street. The spread of that stuff is amazing. It gives everything a soft, furry look but it's death for all the local wildlife that can't eat it, or even travel through it.

 Coffee drunk, I went to the Arboretum. 

The Bog Garden

The Lockerly Arboretum is a very large area landscaped with lawns and as many kinds of trees as can be coaxed to grow in the local conditions. It has a paved one-lane roadway through the entire park, and a number of short trails marked. I wasn't about to try hiking anything during gnat season, which as far as I know is January through December, but certainly includes June. I drove around the grounds, and noticed that there were no blooming plants except the occasional magnolia and something that might be dogwood, all a good distance from the road. When I got back to the parking lot, I consulted a map and saw that there was a small area called the Bog Garden, and another called the Azalea Collection, both a very short distance from the parking area. I walked to those through the cloud of gnats. There was almost nothing blooming in the Bog Garden, and why they call it a bog garden is beyond me. There was nothing but bare earth in the Azalea Collection. So I took a picture of the pretty Rose Hill mansion and left. 

 I found breakfast in the small downtown area at a place called the Local Yolkal. Not just a cute name; this place sets a new standard for breakfast dining. I thought the Eggs Up Cafe in Albany deserved six stars; if that's so, this place rates at least seven. It was utterly outstanding in every way: ambience, service, food quality and quantity, and value. I had Eggs Sardou and (more) coffee, a pleasant exchange with the three employees, and a long conversation with the elderly couple with a service dog named Lady who sat at the next table. These are the kinds of interactions one always hopes for when out in public. Dogs make them possible, I guess.

 I stopped in at a little antique mall a couple of doors down from the cafe, to check out the glass on display in the window. Nothing much of interest, really, but I did find a set of green-and-white mixing bowls from the 1970s just like the ones we have at home, priced at $188. I'm tempted to snort in derision, but after a few episodes of Antiques Roadshow, I'll hold off for now.

The Old Capitol

 My next stop was the Old Capitol Building, on the campus of Georgia Military College. I saw it when I got to town last night and thought it was a church building. It's a very large, architecturally very artless building from 1804, well-maintained but devoid of charm. The entire campus, mostly deserted at present, has a repressed feel to it, like the Stars and Bars should be on the flagpoles. But that's probably just me.

 My last stop in Milledgeville was at Andalusia Farm, the home of the great Southern author Flannery O'Connor. While I consider hers one of the greatest distinctively Southern voices, it's been years since I read her work (all of it, I'm pretty sure). From what I know of her, beyond her work, I would probably not want her as a friend, but her gift for fiction has a resonance tied to the South as a distinctive region. I've tried to read Faulkner, and actually waded through at least a couple of his novels; I read Robert Penn Warren's great novel, All the King's Men and found it uninteresting, like a one-joke comedy. I read Confederacy of Dunces when it was new and didn't find it resonant at all in the Southern Tradition; it's more of a New Orleanian thing. Really, the only Southern novel that I consider as good as O'Connor is Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, which I would put even higher than her work on my list of Great Southern Works.

 I don't have any great interest in seeing the physical remnants of any author's life. Seeing the chair O'Connor sat in and the bed she slept in isn't going to make her work come alive in any way. But what the hell, I'm in Milledgeville, there's not a whole lot of other stuff to see, so I went. They give tours of the house, which I declined; I just went through the little exhibit hall and walked up the hill to see the outside of the main house. A nice house, nothing real fancy. The exhibit hall had a history of the property, some odds and ends like bank documents and old pairs of shoes, and a dozen or so paintings she did near the end of her life, arranged in a truly strange way. The first case had a key giving the number and title of each painting, numbered one through eleven, then thirteen and fourteen. I don't know why 12 was omitted. But why would they mount the paintings on the wall in the order 8, 6, 4, 12, 5, 3, 11, 14, 10, 7, 2, 9, 13, 1, and another 12? It's a mystery. (There's also a small copy of the famous Canova statue, Cupid and Psyche, minus the wings, that O'Connor bought on a trip to Italy just before she died. The museum's card misidentifies it as Cupid and Eros. I noticed the error because, having recently listened to part of Stephen Fry's wonderful book Mythos, I knew immediately that Cupid and Eros are the same person.)

 And with that I could leave Milledgeville in a cloud of self-satisfied smugness, and head on down the road. I did a little dedicated county counting, making a detour from the sensible route in order to get into Wilkinson County; another detour to take in Telfair County; and taking a less-direct route to pass through Dodge County on the way to the Pig Monument. Done, and done, and done. 

The Pig Monument in its setting

 Now, that Pig Monument. As it says on the marker, in 1933 a pig fell down a dry well. Neighbours got together and rescued the pig, because in 1933 a pig was often the difference between starvation and survival. The monument, erected in the 1990s, commemorates the "spirit of friendship and community so characteristic of those times." I note that the farm across the road from the marker flies the Confederate flag, but let's put that aside. A spirit of friendship and community is a worthy aspiration even if the locals can't seem to grasp the barriers they create to it.  

 After the excitement of the Pig Monument, the rest of the drive today was anticlimactic, as you would expect. I went to the Vidalia Onion Museum, where three cheerful docents bent my ear about sweet onions. (While watching a short film about how the onions are grown, I had to wonder that all the farmers who grow these labour-intensive onions probably voted for Trump, who is deporting all their laborers ... except for the guy who referred to his workers as "the inmates.") Then I encountered road closures and detours that flummoxed Google Maps entirely, so ended up taking an overly-long roundabout way to the town of Hazleton, the seat of Jeff Davis County, and on to Broxton, where the Andy Griffith Mural is no longer extant, and to Fitzgerald, where I saw the World's Largest Chicken (actually just the steel frame of it, 19 tons and 62 feet tall, because the money ran out). There's a story there having something to do with the Army Corps of Engineers, but I forget where I read about it so I can't pass it on here. As a result of whatever it was that happened, the town is known for its population of wild chickens. Look it up. 

And then finally, the World's Largest Peanut, in Ashford, a completely uninteresting attraction, but it was on the way.

 I had the top down briefly a couple of times today, once for about 10 minutes and once for about half an hour, but the rain kept starting and stopping so I gave up. I have one Georgia county left after today's drive, and if the weather forecast for tomorrow is like it was today, I'm thinking I will just point my nose towards home instead of going to St Augustine. I don't think I'll regret it either way. 

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!