Bright and early Monday morning we left the quiet of Lake Seminole and headed north with the goal of reaching Warm Springs, GA. The drive was quite pleasant, running through Georgia along on secondary roads just east of the Georgia-Alabama border all the way up to Warm Springs, reaching it by lunchtime.
We made the stop to visit FDR's Little White House, his home in in Warm Springs that predated his presidency. It has been preserved by a local historical group and is now a Georgia State Historic Site. It was where he originally came to treat the effects of polio, continuing to visit throughout his presidency and finally died there in April of 1945. The house itself is very modest and one couldn't imagine a modern president staying in such a place. It has only three small bedrooms, a small, fireplaced, living and dining room and a kitchen, all paneled in pine. There are also two small cottages that flank the main house; a two bedroom guest quarters and a two bedroom servant quarters. When it was built in 1932, it cost $8,738, including landscaping. It has been preserved with its original furnishings and appointments.
There is also a new museum, the third on the site, with a history of Roosevelt's life and his time at Warm Springs. It was certainly a worthwhile stop.
We had originally considered staying at the nearby F. D. Roosevelt State Park overnight, but it was early, so we decided to continue on to Allatoona Lake, another Corps of Engineers lake north of Atlanta, which was our next planned stop. The roads out of Warm Springs continued to be pleasant country roads...then we reached the Interstate outside of Newnan and Peachtree City and entered the long outskirts of Atlanta. Even though we were taking bypass around the city, I-285, the traffic grew and grew, as did the road. It was 12 lanes in our direction at one point.
We got off above Marietta, to do some grocery shopping. There was supposedly a Whole Foods there. The GPS directed us to the location, but we didn't find a Whole Foods, but a Harry's Market. We were pretty fried by that point and I remembered that I had seen a Harry's Market on several episodes of Alton Brown's program, Good Eats, so we decided to give it a try. Turns out it is a Whole Foods...sort of.
I suspect that Harry's was bought out by Whole Foods, much like Bread and Circus in the Boston area, but still uses the Harry's name. But it wasn't quite the same. The inside was like a large warehouse and the store was not arranged like any other Whole Foods we'd ever been in. The aisles first went front-to-back and then side-to-side and nothing was in its usual place. It took us over an hour to do our not very large shopping.
Then the credit cards were not approved! We got through checkout and I slid my LLBean card through and it responded "Not Approved". Ellen then tried hers..."Not Approved". This was not right, so we pulled out an alternative and it passed right through. As we left the store, my phone rang and it was the LLBean Visa Fraud Detection Unit automated call informing me that use of my card was attempted and rejected (as I well knew) and to contact a representative.
I called the number back andwaited on hold for an interminable period. Evidently, having a charge in Florida and then central Georgia on the same day somehow triggered the fraud detection software (I don't know why nothing happened on our travels southward when we were going much further distances between gas fill-ups on the same day.) The customer service rep cleared it all up and now the cards have been flagged as traveling, so it shouldn't happen again.
It was back out to the hot highway and on another 20 miles to Allatoona Lake, where, after a drive through a rather dicey looking neighborhood (lots of mobile homes), we arrived at the campground...in the dark. We did get a waterside site, though.
After a hot and sticky night, things looked better in the morning and we decided to stay another day, finding an even better available site. The lake seemed much smaller than Seminole, but it is long and narrow with many inlets. Although it is 30 miles from Atlanta, it still seems to be in the suburbs and is probably the closest place to get on water. There were several big marinas within view of the campground and lots of fast speedboats buzzing back and forth. The Corps has several campgrounds on the lake, but McKinney, the one we were at, was the only one open at this time of the year.
The reason we came here was to visit Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield, the "Last Mountain" in the way of Sherman's march to Atlanta and the last serious defending action by the Confederates. We had originally planned to take the motorcycles, but there was no way there except via the very bust Interstate or multi-lane, mall-filled suburban highways. So we unhooked the trailer and went off in Speedy.
Unlike Antietam and Gettysburg, Kennesaw Mountain is a long narrow park along the mountain range, surrounded by dense suburbs and six lane roads. Even large chunks of the mountain are in private hands and developed. There are not many places to see, unless you want to walk the 18 miles of trail, which given the temperature, humidity and state of my back, wasn't in the cards for us. So we took in the very complete museum and part of the auto tour before heading back to camp.
No comments:
Post a Comment