A Lost Weekend - Chapter 2

After a “free” breakfast at the hotel I mounted my hog, gassed up and hit the road. My plan was to ride to Alabama. Why not, it was something to achieve. I was on 133 (N. St. Augustine Rd) but wanted to get to highway 84. Trying to stay off of the big interstates I found a nice road, James Rd. that ran along I-75. It dropped me right onto US 84; I turned right and was on my way. They call US 84 the Wiregrass Georgia Parkway and it is a divided 4 lane highway with a grassy median. Obviously 4 lanes aren’t quite as intimate as the two lane county roads, but this wasn’t a bad ride. You get a little bit of everything, curves, hills, rural stretches and plenty of scenic small towns. There was little traffic, much like the day before, and though the speed limit is 65 mph, I hovered most of the time around 60 mph and enjoyed the view. I went through some great little southern towns with plenty of amenities of hotels and restaurants; towns like the very picturesque Quitman, Thomasville, and Bainbridge. There are other smaller towns that if you take the time to pull off and explore, you can get a real sense of life in the south.

One such place that I pulled off in was Climax which caught my eye because of the name and the huge old metal and iron agricultural structure. It turns out that Climax was so named because it is the highest point on the railroad between Savannah, Ga., and the Chattahoochee River. The Climax Community Club hosts the Swine Time Festival (www.swinetimefestival.com) as I found out by noticing a sign painted on the side of a brick building. I took some time to cool off in the shade of an old store front and reapply some sunscreen.

Further on down the road I was just east of Donalsonville passing yet another peanut farm when a green sign of the Golden Peanut Company caught my eye. When I was a young boy in upstate New York, I sold peanuts door to door to finance my trip to Boy Scout summer camp. They were golden peanuts from the Golden Peanut Company and here I was, 35 years later, in the middle of nowhere looking back into my own history! How cool is that? It wasn’t long after that I was crossing the Chattahoochee River into Alabama.