After spending five days in Montgomery, it was time to leave.
But first we needed to stop at the Waffle House next to our RV park. To me a Waffle House is almost like going home to eat. All the staff greets you with a simultaneous chorus when you enter the restaurant and you’re invited to have a seat anywhere. I had a giant breakfast that would also double as my lunch. Heck, it’s better than home!
The waitress started up a conversation with us because she saw our kayaks on top of our truck. She had tried it several times and just loved it. This has happened to us more than once, people see our kayaks, tell us they’ve tried it and love it, and now they want to buy one, since renting them is expensive.
So here’s a business tip for you, find companies that make kayaks and invest in them. According to my totally unscientific survey, this should be the next American craze. Once you buy a kayak and all the accoutrements, it becomes a fairly inexpensive sport. Just find a body of water, put your kayak in and have fun. And depending on what type of body of water you find will determine your kayak ride: a smooth lake, a wavy ocean, a river either swift or slow, and then there’s the scenery that goes with the different waterways. I really like to kayak. Can you tell?
As we’re getting to leave the Waffle House, Marianne’s mom calls and lets us know that we’ve left at least one dog bed there, plus she needs further instruction on how to run her new CD player, her TV set has lost her favorite channel again, and her computer froze up. So rather than haul the trailer over there through the narrow streets with low hanging branches, we decided to drive directly from the Waffle House there.
It took me about one-half hour to explain and fix the electronic problems. Marianne just loves traveling with an in-house IT tech (aka nerd).
We said our good-byes again, hooked up the trailer and headed toward Andersonville, Georgia where Marianne’s college roommate, Janice Baldwin, has lived with her radiologist husband, Mike, for almost 20 years.
Andersonville was the home of the infamous Confederate prisoner of war camp, known as Camp Sumter where almost 13,000 of the 45,000 Union prisoners died during their internment in the Civil War, also known as the War of Northern Aggression here in the South.
Mike and Jan have 250 acres of woodland with a large pond surrounding their impressive home. They also have seven dogs: Itchy, Scratchy, Beetle, Franklin, Rerun, Tuna, and one more whose name escapes me. They quickly adopted our two dogs into their pack and off they went romping around. It was only later that Jan tells me that her dogs have been bitten by rattlesnakes, killed by cottonmouths, and last fall Mike shot a 10’ alligator in their pond. I just hoped my city dogs could keep up with their country cousins.
Jan drove her Kawaski Mule to their long driveway, One Toad Road, to lead us unto their property where we would park our trailer for the night. For the first time on this trip, I fired up our generator so we would have the electricity to power our air-conditioner, since it was still very hot here as well. The generator worked great and in no time at all our trailer was a cool oasis, on a field of green, about 100 yards from their home, overlooking their pond.
Mike was still at the hospital reading X-rays, or whatever a radiologist does, so Jan showed us her artist’s shack where she creates her beautiful batiks. She gave Marianne and I each one. Thanks, Jan!
After a short time Mike came home, and we had couple of beers before we had a delicious stir-fry dinner with corn on the cob prepared by Jan.
After dinner we put our dogs into the trailer and all got on Jan’s Mule (Mike has another one), and headed out on the numerous trails on the property. Several of the dogs rode with us on the Mule, while others just ran ahead and behind us. One of the trails led us to the bin where Mike had dragged the alligator to dry it out so that he could collect the skull and other bones. Mike also has a number of large (and I mean LARGE) dried rattlesnake skins he killed mounted in the house.
Back at the house we had some pie for dessert, learned of their journey to Africa, compete with lion and elephant encounters, and caught up on each other’s lives since we last saw each other in Oceanside a few years ago.When we got ready to turn in for the night, we were greeted by a new chorus of frogs emanating from their pond. But these frogs seemed to have a Georgian rather than an Alabamian accent, but they were equally as loud.
No comments:
Post a Comment