Departed: Manchester, TN 10:00 Arrived: Athens, GA 4:00 234 miles
Hey Everybody,
We decided Thursday night, we'd take a detour by Athens to see the kids. So we start off Thursday morning down the hill from Manchester, TN (the home of Bonoroo, don't know if I'm spelling that right, a mini Woodstock) to Chattanooga, TN. A lovely mountainous drive, which was interrupted by a "rolling roadblock". You may ask, what is that, well let me backtrack... as we are getting on I-24 south in Manchester we see several patrolman putting out what looked like those things that if you run over them you get flat tires. We think oh, there's a high speed chase going on, excitement! We go a few miles, nothing seems to be going on. Few miles further and we pull out to pass a truck and as we do the car behind us not noticing this truck comes flying up, slams on brakes and has to swerve off the road to avoid slamming into the truck. I'm thinking there's the bad guys! The car then gains control and comes back speeding by us. So we roll on a bit further and see a sign, "rolling roadblock in progress".... which means two patrol cars are blocking each lane only allowing the lanes to go 35 mph. So now my imagination is really going, and I'm thinking somewhere in front of us are the bad guys and the roadblock is an effort to stop them without having a shootout! The rolling roadblock continues on about 5 miles with traffic backing up and around the mountain. Finally, we see signs that say utility work ahead. As we get closer we see a bucket truck high in the sky tying off wires that now cross above the highway. So no bad guys, just utility worker guys. Oh well, it made for great entertainment for about 30 minutes Thursday morning.
We come on down to Dalton, GA where I ask Bill, had you rather go through Atlanta, maneuver through Spaghetti Junction, or get off I-75 here and maneuver through mountains by way of Chatsworth, Ellijay, Dawsonville, Gainesville, and then Athens. He chose mountains. Little did we know that meant really backroad mountainous roads. We ended up following for the most part a scenic road called, Georgia Federal Trail, part of which was the Trail of Tears which started in that part of Georgia. Needless to say our 4 hour drive turned into about a 6 hour drive!
Friday:
Depart: Athens 9:00 Arrive: Thomasville 2:30
After having a good visit with Julie, Josh, William, and Danielle last night, we pulled out for the last leg of our awesome cross country trip. I immediately went to sleep, after a restless night of listening to the trains come through Athens. I woke up just in time to see the Goodyear blimp crossing through middle Georgia. If you look hard in this picture you might can see it!
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| Goodyear Blimp |
As we pulled into town, I rolled the window down for Halle, she knew she smelled some familiar smells.
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| Windblown Halle! |
So we made it home safely 5000 miles later! Glad we did it! Glad to be home!
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| Thomasville City Limits...sight for sore eyes! |
The first things I did were check my plants, only lost one.
Took back my 15 libary books that were two days late. Only owed 2.50. I finished my last one between Coolidge and Thomasville, pretty good spacing out. And while in the car turned on the radio! Bill prefers to drive in silence, thus the need for so many library books.
Next thing I will do is take a long bath, followed by an even longer shower!
I hope you have enjoyed this journey with us as we found out what a beautiful and BIG country we have! Thanks for coming along!
One Happy Camper,
Carla
