Almost to Florida

 6-26-2021 - Saturday

We took a few minutes to walk down to the river this morning with our coffee.  It was a nice morning. 

 But we were on the road by 8:30, knowing we needed to make miles this morning to get to Atlanta.  It was 69 degrees when we started out, got up to 88, then cooled off a few degrees when we were getting to our campground because we had a little rain shower.  We know Atlanta always has road construction, no matter how you go through it, so we just headed down I-75, hoping for the best.  Actually, it wasn't too bad, we got through in about 30 minutes, with just 2 road closure back-ups and one wreck. But I had plenty of time to take pictures.  Here is our traffic, with downtown Atlanta in the background.

The only other downtown picture I took is of this 123-foot torch obstruction deck built for the 1996 Olympics.  I missed the picture of the baseball stadium.

 Its about 30 miles across Atlanta, from the exit to the bypass to where it comes back in.  After we cleared the city, we exited and had breakfast.  But no sooner did we get back on I-75 that we hit road construction again.  Traffic was backed up 2 miles before construction started, so we got off and headed over to Hwy 41.  This put us back in Joe's old stomping ground from his trucking days, so he was familiar with many of the little towns on this road.  We zigged and zagged across Georgia, staying off I-75.  We missed a turn, made a turn too soon, but managed to keep moving south and east.  Along U.S. 41, we passed the Atlanta Motor Speedway, which is a long ways from Atlanta.  We were surprised to see it out here.

Not too many miles further, we came upon what looked like a motorcross (or quad) track that someone had built.

Joe made a bathroom stop right beside a peach orchard, so I walked over and checked it out.  The peaches were looking good, but were all pretty hard.  I picked up the one on the ground, but it was not ready.

Then we noticed across the road they were cutting and baling hay.  That was cool to see.

Just as we pulled back onto the highway, we saw a peach stand across the road.  Although I had just concluded the peaches were not ready yet, we pulled in to check them out.  We could see they also had cantaloupes.  Well, they did have some ripe peaches, from trees right behind them.  We bought tomatoes, peaches and a cantaloupe.  We ate one of the peaches for dinner and it was good.

Our original plan was to get back on I-75 after we thought we were past the road construction, but we enjoyed driving through the countryside on the regular highways so much more than the interstate that we just stayed with them.  We even marked up my state map with the route we had figured out, and even then missed two turns.  But I had found a campground that was sort of in the right area, so we called and found out they had a spot for us.  It really was out in the boondocks, back a dirt road (Joe's favorite kind), and by then it had started raining just a bit.  No one was around, so I called the guy again and he came right over and showed us where to park.  It was nothing fancy, but adequate for the night.  I think we are about 50-60 miles from the Florida state line.

Under Bridgette's pressure from yesterday, we drove longer and further today than we had been.  312 miles, almost 9 hours driving (with an hour stop for breakfast, then a few other (very brief) stops.  We didn't get off the road until 5:20.  And then I had to cook since we are not close to civilization.

Bridgette called not long after we got set up to see what kind of progress we had made today.  She told Catalina we would be there tomorrow, so Catalina was going to go to bed at 6:00 so we would be there when she got up.  They are supposed to go to the Tampa Bay Rays baseball game tomorrow, so I told them to go to that, and we should be there by the time they got home (it's an afternoon game).  Hopefully we can keep that promise.

The only wildlife we saw today was some geese we spooked right beside the road.  But we saw lots of fields, lots of lakes, ponds and rivers, and lots of traffic. Joe found gas today for $2.769 so he was happy about that.  One more day on the road and we should be at our destination!