This year Louie and I decided to do a road trip around Georgia and South Carolina. Our main reason was to give him the opportunity to get rid of a sailboat he’d had sitting around for various personal reasons. Then I thought, well, we can visit my parents, and I thought Charleston would be fun, then added Savannah, and then the beach, and visiting my friend April in Atlanta, and there you have it: another great road trip! This one was hot and buggy and had a lot of great food, compared to our typical summer trips, but it was nice. (Next year we want to go west, and preferably north.)

So the first step was towing the boat to Macon, Georgia. As always, we work too much, and were too busy leading up to the trip. The day before we were to leave, Louie realized that the tires on the boat trailer just weren’t going to cut it, so instead of setting off first thing in the morning to Macon, he had to go to Wentzville to get new boat trailer tires first! Not a great start (oh, and did I mention it was pouring rain), but necessary.

But we did finally get on the road, around 10 am, I believe. It was still raining, but I’ll tell you, it’s easier to load up a truck for a road trip than a Corolla. It’s harder to drive, and I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t drive…I probably should have driven the truck after we dumped the trailer, but I was afraid of wrecking it, and I really didn’t want to drive it with the towing. Louie did a fantastic job driving the whole way, and I just sat there looking pretty.

Louie, inspecting the boat after a few hours of driving. Various parts kept flapping around.

So we ended up having a very long day—google told us it was 9 hours to Macon, but it took 12 plus a few stops, and we lost an hour, so we didn’t get in until after midnight. I will say I did a lovely job packing avocado egg salad sandwiches for us to eat, so we were able to eat good food along the way without having to stop at McDonald’s or Taco Bell.

The next day we did some sightseeing around Macon with Louie’s relatives (basically). We went to the Ocmulgee National Monument, which is Macon’s version of the Cahokia Mounds. (Side note: everybody we met in Georgia and parts of South Carolina,  after visiting Macon, seemed to have spent some portion of their lives living in Macon…the Macon folks are proud of their hometown! It was a nice place, and probably better to live in than visit, I suppose, though evidently they no longer have a symphony orchestra so that’s less interesting to me ).

It was a VERY hot day, which set the tone for the trip. The South in August…I wouldn’t have expected anything different.  Anyway, that’s the visitor’s center which has a very informative museum.

I have naturally already forgotten it all. This is Louie posing in front of a hut of sorts. I presume this was a reconstruction.

Unlike Cahokia, at Ocmulgee you get to go inside a mound. This one even had air conditioning! This was behind glass—a recent development, I was told.

That’s the outside of the mound you can go in! Who would believe there is a whole room under there? Also much cooler and out of the sun (even before the Native Americans put air conditioning in).

We found this lawn mower really interesting—it’s like a roomba but for lawn mowers. Much safer than going up steep hills on a riding mower, I guess!

You can see downtown Macon from the top of another mound, the Great Temple Mound. You can also see the Visitor’s Center from there. (One of my favorite things to do at the Cahokia Mounds is to loudly exclaim that the reason the mounds were built was to see the Arch. I actually did this once and people looked at me with horror, and it was a proud moment.)

This is Louie, out standing in a field. It’s a field on top of a large mound though, so that’s even more impressive.

Okay, sorry, enough not funny jokes!

After the mounds we had a unofficial driving tour of downtown Macon and then went back to the house to clean up before dinner. We had dinner at a restaurant called Brasserie Circa, which was very tasty—the bread especially was good. During dinner there was a HUGE storm that came through, and there were lots of tree branches down in the neighborhood. The next morning Louie had some paperwork to deal with with the boat and trailer, but after that, we were on our way, heading to Savannah next…and that’s a blog post for another day.

So that was Macon! Short but sweet. It was nice to see Louie’s people there, to see the town, and to drop off the boat. It is hard to transition into vacation mode for us but Macon was a good start.