One year ago today: December 20, 2021, still sells $5 million annually.
Five years ago today: December 20, 2017, the early cabin.
Nine years ago today: December 20, 2013, most boring blog post, ever.
Random years ago today: December 20, 2010, perching pelicans.
Hello from Roswell, GA. I wish I’d known the town was here, but I had breakfast in Canton. Roswell is a bustling small city. I had the pancakes and sausage, no coffee, came to $5.50. These Democrats are goners, they created this fake “supply crisis” by raising the tax on diesel. I’m still in the mountains. I think Roswell grows a lot of crabapples. The town is nearly five miles off the highway, down crabapple lane, crabapple street, and crabapple avenue, across hardscrabble road. They’re pushing the heritage theme and it looks like they let people sell cooked food out of their houses. Or it could be for appearances.
I’m 40 miles out of Atlanta and the roads are already a mess. I’m hitting that Georgia stretch where the only radio stations are religion and NPR. They had a broadcast concerning Paul Revere’s ride to warn the conspirators of the British, how he galloped along with his tailcoats streaming in the wind. Well, the radio guest has concluded that Paul’s horse, and horses in general, are under-represented in the contemporary versions of history. She’s bent on forming a group to find out more about Paul’s horse and its family and upbringing. You can’t make this shit up.
I drove around the side of Atlanta, then made the mistake of stopping in Macon. The road system is a nightmare and I got caught in it. The Macon Dollar Tree is not in Macon, but several miles out of town and I finally found it. I needed some quick repairs to the plywood panel I rigged up in the van as a support for the GPS and maps. To do any real travel exploring, you need both. I thought I’d continue on the side roads and got so badly turned around it took me nearly an hour to find the highway to Perry. I had to backtrack and turn around constantly to find Highway 129. The GPS system itself probably works fine, it has a series of intersecting circles that have intelligent timing pulses.
Star fort remnants, Portugal.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
South of Macon, there’s a large sort of industrial district. The buildings look like WWII era bunkers. It’s the appearance of small factories that once produced parts for the military. The products are low tech, like springs and motor cores, products that survived this long. The GPS is useless, as this area has many roads that parallel the main routes, I’ve been lost here by motorcycle before. That’s how I got out of that mess, I began to recognize horse farms and some architecture. In the end, I went 53 miles to find an entrance back on the freeway. Georgia shares a trait with Florida. No matter how well you find a dead end road with a big “No Outlet” sign to park and read your map, some dickweed will come along and you’re in his way. See this van with the flat tire? I call that the J6 buggy. Read on to find out why.
Another GPS glitch is it lacks the smarts to know what direction you are traveling. So my plan to use the rest stops went awry. Most of them were on the other side of the divided highway. Some of them were six miles from the nearest overpass. I drove past Cordele, the town that didn’t believe there was such a thing as a newspaper. I finally found one and I was zonked again, two hours. It wastes sunlight but it looks like the Miami Moon is going to be out. With a slight overcast, the Moon is bright enough to make the horizon visible all round except to the north. If so, I will continue driving.
Later, yep, it’s bright and I crossed the Florida-Georgia border at 7:30PM. It’s nice to be back in the tropics I got John on the phone finally and he’s got the flue heavy duty. Can’t get out a sentence without wheezing, but you know that guy, thinks he’s fine and won’t take some down time to recover proper. It also means three hours of NPR which has degenerated into a constant stream of anti-Trump hit pieces. Double weird, as the Democrats are going ballistic trying to push through a huge series of spending bills before the Republicans take over in two weeks. I urge the Republicans to not bother fighting the bill, just delaying it. Any delay in the Democrat’s supply of stolen money always has serious consequences.
I make it into town at 10:00PM under diffuse moonlight. Visible to the southwest were flashes of huge lightning storms over the Gulf, indicated some wet weather within 24 hours. A call from Tennessee informs me it will get worse. I logged on to see it is 40 below in Alberta and that will plunge us into deep winter. It was a rare pleasant night drive. It was insane the way the J6 people are crying for relevance. They know if they can’t make anything stick on Trump, there is a chance their own activities will be investigated. They pulled stunts like not allowing any witnesses for the defense. They know they have no legal authority so now we have the curious situation of them recommending prosecution to the Justice department, who have no intention of being told what to do by anybody on a partisan committee.
ADDENDUM
The new stopwatch allows for much better navigation calculations. I want to include declination so I was at several libraries this week to make a discover. All books on this subject have disappeared. It could be how GPS means the books are no longer checked out. But every library and all at once? Plus, all the websites that used to give at least the basics are all gone. They direct you to on-line calculation sites, which we all know teach your nothing. The users can go through the motions, but cannot sense when things are wrong. Fortunately, I have six classic books on the topic at home.
