Bye Bye Georgia

We left Augusta, Georgia today, on our way to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  As we crossed the Savannah River, we had to say goodbye to Georgia.  This made David nostalgic, and he started searching his iPod for songs about Georgia.  Here are what he found for your listening pleasure:

"Georgia On My Mind," by Ray Charles

"Rainy Night in Georgia," by Brook Benton

"Midnight Train to Georgia," by Gladys Knight & The Pips

"The Devil Went Down to Georgia," by Charlie Daniels

"The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia," by Vicki Lawrence

"Georgia," by Boz Scaggs

"Ramblin' Man," by Allman Brothers Band

"Walkin' Back to Georgia," by Jim Croce

"Georgia," by Elton John

Navigating the Augusta Canal

Low bridge ev'-ry bod-y down, 

Low bridge for we're com-in to a town, 

And you al-ways know your neighbor, 

You'll always know your pal, 

If you've ev-er navigated on the Augusta can-al

Hi Blog!

It has been raining for the past three days.  We really didn't mind the first two days of rain.  We got a lot accomplished - did some chores, read a couple books and made some travel plans. However, by the fourth day, we were ready to escape the confines of our one bedroom apartment on wheels. Even though the sun hadn't appeared yet, we went into town with a promise from the weatherman that - yes, the sun will shine today. 

Ever since coming back from Lima, Peru (where we visited our niece, Hannah and her partner, David - owners of several coffee shops), we have been hopelessly addicted to our new coffee making devices - the Clever and the Areopress.  As we travel about, we are constantly in search of local coffee roasters who can supply us with freshly roasted coffee beans, which we turn into the elixir of life. Today, our first stop was at Buona Caffe, owned and operated by John and Pat Curry. Several years ago, John started roasting coffee at home. After extensive testing with fellow coffee aficionados, John and Pat started Buona Caffe (“good coffee” in Italian) Artisan Roasted Coffee to offer the coffee that they enjoy in their home every day. Who could ask for more - homemade coffee in a very homey shop.

We left with four bags - Bali Blue Moon, Tanzanian Peaberry, Sumatra Ketiara Gayo and Ethiopian Sidamo. Until Blogger invents the "Smell Button," you will just have to take our word for it that this coffee smells heavenly. We would have brought home more, but space in the RV is limited.  This just means that sometime in the future we'll have to venture forth and discover another artisan roaster! It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it!

Next stop, Augusta Canal National Heritage Area. We had reservations for a 3:00 p.m. canal boat tour, but we wanted to come down early and spend a little time in the Interpretive Center and then take a bike ride along the tow path. Here is Kathy looking over one of the historical displays explaining how "cotton was king" in Augusta, which was central not only in trading and shipping raw cotton, but also in processing the raw cotton and making finished goods from it.

The Interpretive Center is located in the Enterprise Mill, a revitalized 19th Century textile mill.  In 1983, Graniteville Company shut down the facility. During the mid and late 1980s, the city originally planned to demolish the aging building. However, a major renovation took place in 1995 as part of the downtown redevelopment, and the developers re-purposed the building into offices and loft apartments. The water powered turbines that generated electricity for the mill are still in operation today, providing power to the tenants and selling the surplus back to the state.

After a quick lunch, we jumped on the bikes and began pedaling upstream. Augusta was home to the Confederate Powderworks, a gunpowder factory during the American Civil War and the only permanent structures ever completed anywhere by the Confederate States of America. The 150 foot Powderworks chimney is all that remains. The building behind the chimney is the Sibley cotton mill which was built on the site as a private venture in 1882, using bricks from the demolished powder works. Sibley Mill became one of the largest and most successful cotton mills in the region, a model of good management and worker relations. It manufactured denim until 2006. The mill is closed now, but the mill's water-driven turbines still generate electricity which is sold to Georgia Power.

Further upstream, we came to Rae's Creek.  The original canal actually traversed the creek via an aqueduct. However, when the canal needed expanding, Rae's Creek was dammed, creating Lake Olmstead. The water from Rae's Creek now flows directly into the canal, with any excess being diverted into spillways, which direct the excess water to the other side of the canal along the original creek bed until it reaches the Savanah River. Here is the first spillway located just past the Olmstead Bulkhead.

Here is the second spillway coming down from the Tin House Gate.

The ride across the Tin House Gate was exciting. Later, our tour guide told us that this railing is relatively new.  Too many people fell off that they decided to put up a railing.

Just as we were reaching the turn-around point, one of the tour boats caught up to us.  These boats are replicas of the original Petersburg boats that use to transport cargo from Petersburg down to Augusta.

We quickly retraced our route to make sure we got back in time for our 3:00 p.m. tour.  Here in the background is Julianna, our tour guide, with our fearless boat captain plying the rudder behind her. The nice couple in the foreground hails from Maryland and also have a home in Mullan, Idaho, which is close to where David's grandparents lived in Wallace, Idaho. We also met an Augusta family, whose daughter, Katie, was on Spring Break from Yale University. We did ask if she knew our Katie, who is currently working at Yale.  While the name was familiar, she didn't know her. Still, small world.

Here is another view of the Tin House Gate. The water just seems to disappear over the edge.

You know that song about the canal - "low bridge, everybody down" - well they mean it.  Here is Kathy moments away from decapitation as the 13 foot boat tries to make its way through the 15 foot wide door in the Olmstead Bulkhead.

This low bridge is called the "Butt Bridge" in honor of Major Archibald Butt, in memory of his heroism during the sinking of the Titanic.

As noted earlier in the blog, we had just experienced three straight days of rain. Note to self - don't bike on the canal towpath so soon after heavy rain.  Back at the RV, we had to power-wash the bikes to get all this caked mud off:

Tomorrow, we move to Mrytle Beach!  Happy Hump Day!

Getting to Know Augusta

Our first day in Augusta, Georgia will be one of the nicest days, weather-wise, so we decided to make the most of it and get around town.

Our first stop was the Augusta Museum of History, which has permanent exhibits telling the history of the Augusta area and the Savannah River, which runs down to Augusta from the southern Appalachian Mountains and on to Savannah on the Atlantic coast.  It also has an excellent exhibit on the history of golf, golfers associated with Augusta, and four great Augusta courses.

In the lobby is a statue of Bobby Jones, who, after winning the Grand Slam of golf, returned to Augusta to design the world famous Augusta National Golf Course, which hosts the annual Masters Tournament:

Several exhibits explain the history of Augusta National:

Bobby Jones isn't the only famous Augusta personage.  There was also an exhibit on Ty Cobb:

Perhaps Augusta's most famous resident was James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul," and there is a large exhibit on his life and career:

The City of Augusta even has erected a statue of James Brown in the center of town.  Here, Kathy is getting up close and personal with The Man:

The main street of Augusta is Broad Street, which runs parallel to the Savannah River.  Broad Street is intent on restoration, although there are a number of vacant storefronts and too much traffic allowed in some places.  A trendy bar and restaurant area has grown up, however, which was fun to explore.  And, the occasional random art showed up:

The City of Augusta is protected from flooding by a levee along the entire stretch of the Savannah River where it passes the City.  It has been improved with River Walk Park, including statuary art, historical and explanatory markers, playgrounds, fishing spots, and restful viewpoints:

It was Saturday afternoon when we walked along the river, and the park was alive with many people using it to maximum advantage.  The promenade even has an Analemmatic Sundial whose accuracy Kathy demonstrated in the photo below.  Yep:  5:00 p.m.  The sundial noted that it was programmed to follow Daylight Savings Time.

Our ultimate destination was a riverboat ride along the Savannah River.  Just after we got to the dock, the boat arrived:

We eagerly boarded, found our seats and recorded the beginning of our ride:

We're smiling in the photo above because, as the boat left the dock, the captain played the "Theme from Gilligan's Island".  He hastened to explain that the boat ride was to be only 2 hours because a 3 hour cruise would be too dangerous.

The tour began with views of houses built ON the levee protecting the city from the river.  Our captain gave no reason why anyone in their right mind would authorize building on a levee, and we wondered at the obviously large amounts of money people spent on the houses:

Yet more expensive mansions were built on the opposite side of the river, in North Augusta, which is actually in South Carolina (the Savannah River is the border between Georgia and South Carolina), and, the further upstream we moved, the more expensive the mansions.  The most spectacular were reserved for the stretch with a view of lands in Georgia that are protected from development by the Augusta Canal National Heritage Area.

Eventually, we reached the Fall Line of the river, where it spilled over granite shelves marking the ancient fault line between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain.  When North America and Africa collided eons ago to make the Pangaean supercontinent, the compression where they met shoved sheets of sedimentary rock over each other to make the Fall Line.  Here we can see the extremely shallow water created by the shelf of the Fall Line.  A cypress tree grows out of the water, which is so shallow here that ancient Native Americans, as well as the exploring Spanish, crossed the Savannah River at this location.

As the boat motored back down the river past Augusta, we saw graffiti on the pillars of two of the bridges spanning the river.  Our captain related that this stretch of the river is the location of annual Head of the South Regatta, hosted by the Augusta Rowing Club.  Participating teams have, over the years, taken opportunities to paint their team logos on various bridge pillars.

Our boat continued downstream a half hour before turning back up toward Augusta.  By this time, sunset was approaching, and we spent a wonderful, quiet ride enjoying the drama and color of the sky, clouds and water:

The City of Augusta drifted slowly toward us until we docked at the River Walk Marina, with the setting sun and part of the Augusta skyline in the background:

A day well spent, and now we know much more about this gracious Southern city.  This gives us lots of idea for the rest of our stay.

Eddie & George Wake Up at Augusta National!

F. Scott, Zelda and More!

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Elliott, Four Quartets, Little Gidding

(the photo above is of a small garden pool at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and these words are carved in the concrete around the edge of the pond)

Dear Readers! If you were expecting scenic beach photos, lush tropical gardens or natural wonders, then I suggest you check out another blog. However, if you wish to dabble a little with art and investigate some literary folks, then let's get started.

Now you may be wondering what a wagon train has to do with great works of art and literature, but you see, we had to get from our campground to the museums. It was another blue sky beautiful day, so we decided to ride our bikes. If you read Tuesday's blog, you know Kathy's bike had a terrible blowout that destroyed the tube and tire.  Luckily, we had a spare tire back at the rig.  When we got home yesterday, we replaced the tire and tube and Kathy's bike was good as new. As for the wagon train, there is a rodeo in town this weekend.  These folks are making their way to the Fairgrounds about four miles down the road.  We passed them and wished them luck.

We started putting some distance between ourselves and the traffic jam the wagon train was causing when all of a sudden....

Psssssssss!

Oh, no! Not again.  This time it was Dave's tire that suddenly went flat. Luckily, the tire itself was not too damaged, just a small slice in the tread. We got out the handy dandy duct tape that, since Tuesday, we now carry in our bike bags and proceeded to duct tape the slice and then insert a new tube. Montgomery, Alabama has now cost us 2 tires and tubes.  This has become a very expensive place to bike.  Here is Dave showing off the hole in his tube.

Before we got Dave's bike back on the road, the wagon train caught up to us. You can just imagine the comments we got - "Try a horse next time!"; "Did you throw a shoe?" It was all in good fun.  They did ask if we needed help, but we assured them we could make the repairs ourselves.  We are getting quite good at it by now. By the time we caught back up to the wagon train, they were arriving at the Fairgrounds.

We continued on our trek into Montgomery and pedaled through the campus of Alabama State University. Founded as a school for African-Americans, today Alabama State University is a widely respected, world-class institution of higher learning which welcomes students of all races.  It has an attractive entrance arch and football stadium:

Just on the other side of the campus, we arrived at our destination - the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum. The couple had only lived briefly in this house, from 1931-1932, since they spent most of their time moving among New York, Los Angeles and Paris, Frances.  The Fitzgeralds made several excursions to Europe, mostly Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair. Zelda Fitzgerald was an icon of the 1920s—dubbed by her husband "the first American Flapper." The Fitzgeralds were celebrities.

Zelda was also a very accomplished artist. After her death, much of her artwork has been reappraised as interesting in its own right. After spending much of the 1950s and '60s in family attics—Zelda's mother even had much of the art burned because she disliked it—scholars began to examine the art. Exhibitions of her work have toured the United States and Europe. A review of the exhibition concluded that her surviving corpus of art "represents the work of a talented, visionary woman who rose above tremendous odds to create a fascinating body of work—one that inspires us to celebrate the life that might have been." Zelda's family owns 64 of her paintings and the museum owns eleven, some of which are shown below:

Others of her artworks are held by art museums, as we'll mention further below.

The museum is in the process of collecting all things Fitzgerald, including objects relating to their daughter, Frances Scott ("Scotty") Fitzgerald. Her childhood was as tempestuous as the life her parents lived, having been thrown out of her boarding school in 1938. She was subsequently accepted to Vassar College and went on to write musical comedies about the Washington social scene which were performed annually to benefit the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Washington. Here is Kathy looking over Scotty's clippings.

After leaving the Fitzgerald Museum, we stopped for lunch at Martin's. Martin's Restaurant has been in business since the 1930's. A family owned and operated restaurant serving a "meat and three" style lunch since the 1930's. It is one of the oldest full service restaurants in Montgomery, Alabama. While the decor probably hasn't changed since the 1930's, the fried chicken chef salad was outstanding.

After lunch, we pedaled over to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.  Here is a view of the museum from across a nearby pond:

The museum is located in the Wynton M. Blount Cultural Park. Mr. Blount and his wife Carolyn, were philanthropists and notable patrons of the arts. Together they founded the Blount Cultural Park, which is home to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The Blounts donated the land and a 100,000 square foot theatre as the new home of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1985. The cost was $21.5 million and at the time was the largest private donation to an American theatre. The park has several lakes.  As we walked around the museum to its entrance, we paused under this cherry tree for a beautiful view of ducks and one of the ponds:

Embraced by the museum and overlooking the pond is a whimsical garden based on T.S. Elliot's quotation above and the garden that is a theme in Four Quartets.  This statue overlooks the garden pond shown in the first photo of this blog entry:

We thought these guys were so cute, we took a second picture of them from inside looking out.

The garden has some other unexpected sculptures.  Here is Dave making a new friend.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1930 with the mission "to collect, preserve, exhibit, and interpret art of the highest quality for the enrichment, enlightenment, and enjoyment of its public." The museum is the oldest fine arts museum in Alabama and was the first museum in Alabama to be accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in June 1978. The museum moved to its current home in the Blount Cultural Park, in 1988. The space is spectacular.  Here is a view through artistic stained glass windows in the Lowder Gallery:

The museum contains some striking art.  We thought you might appreciate a sampling of some pieces that got our attention.

This is "Cazador de Nubes (Cloud Hunter)," 2005, by Edgar Soberon (American, born Cuba 1962):

Another cloud painting also is diverting - "Clouds, Giverny," 1911, by Theodore Earl Butler (American, 1860-1936), which calls to mind Monet or Van Gogh:

This painting - "South of Study Butte," 1952, by William Lester (American, 1910-1991) - is a representation of an area near Terlingua, Texas, by Big Bend National Park, where we stayed for two weeks:

Recalling our tour of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, we found one painting, "Hope," ca. 1938, by Zelda Fitzgerald (American, 1900-1948):

We thought this doughnut sculpture was particularly interesting because it is constructed from large tree branches that have been cut on the bias and smoothed so that the grain show.  These are the light-colored shapes in the doughnut below.  The dark-colored areas between them are empty, three-dimensional spaces that go deep into the doughnut:

Yet another painting we liked was "View of Manhattan from the Terminal Yards, Weehawken, New Jersey," 1913, by Abraham Leon Krill (American, 1884-1974):

We discovered two paintings in the museum, by different artists, that are directly related.  One is "New York Office," 1962, by Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967) --

-- and the other is "Requiem for a Planet, to Moran and Hopper," 2000, by David Bierk (Canadian, born USA, 1944-2002), which contains a representation of Hopper's painting, but with significant differences:

Bierk created this work specifically for The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, referring to two paintings in the museum’s collection: "Dusk Wings", by Thomas Moran and "New York Office", by Edward Hopper. These works, created about one hundred years apart, are iconic depictions of the American landscape, one rural and bucolic, the other urbanized. Bierk physically separated Moran’s pure landscape (a world made anew each day, pristine and unspoiled by man and his needs) from Hopper’s city scene by surrounding the earlier work with wide, dark, steel plates, which may suggest that we have imprisoned nature now in our constructions and technology.  Hopper’s image, on the right, has no such literal framing element, but in a sense, as Bierk revealed, the built environment of office window and street isolates the female figure like a confining frame. The painting’s title, "Requiem for a Planet", further explicates Bierk’s theme. There is danger in overtaxing the resources of nature, he implied; to do so is to compromise its ability to support our very lives. The melancholy image of the woman behind the window resonates with our own feelings of loss and disconnection from a natural world that is slowly devolving into oblivion.  At least this is what the museum curator's notes say.

And so ends our cultural foray into Montgomery, Alabama. Tomorrow we move to Augusta, Georgia.