Road Trip Detours

Two possibilities exist to explain how any road trip from Auburn, Alabama to Gainesville, Florida passes through the tiny (pop. 683) town of Plains, Georgia: (a) you are way lost or (b) you really want to go there. For Pretty and me yesterday, it was a little bit of both.

For most of my life, I’ve traveled with a Road Atlas the size of a very large paperback book bound with plastic spirals – the kind with each state on one big page (or two if it’s Texas) and the most obscure county roads shown on the maps as well as the state highways and interstates with the little numbers in red or blue showing the distance from one town to another. As a matter of fact, I used one so much in the past five years, it disintegrated and I had to throw it away last year.

No need for another one, said Pretty, since we have all directions in our GPS cyberspace maps now. The GPS knows where we are and if we know where we want to go, a pleasant brilliant woman tells us how to get there. This is, indeed, a fine system as long as we know exactly where it is we want to go.

If, on the other hand, we are on a road trip without a specific agenda and only a vague idea of where Gainesville is in relation to Auburn, I personally would prefer a Road Atlas to get the general lay of the geography before I strike out. But, then, we might have missed our detour to Plains.

Plains is the home of President Jimmy Carter

Pretty and I have visited Plains two other times and when we found that our GPS navigator sent us east of Columbus, Georgia yesterday through the peanut farming country, we remembered we were near Plains and decided to take a detour to visit again. The brilliant woman told us just how to get there.

Plains is one main street – no stop light

 One Historic Inn with Antiques

(note the one vehicle parked in front – ours)

Pretty walked through the store while the dogs walked me and my camera outside in the drizzle.

Not much going on at the Plains Pharmacy, either

Hey, but don’t worry about business in Plains because this weekend former President Jimmy Carter will be teaching his Sunday School class at the Maranatha Baptist Church, and the Plains Historic Inn is full… with a waiting list, thank you very much. People still come from all over the world to hear this peanut farmer who became the 39th. President of the United States in 1976 and chose to come home to live where he grew up when he left the White House in 1981.

My love for the Carters is no secret, but I had to marvel again yesterday as we wandered around Plains, at the simple country school house and the memory of “Miss Julia,” the school superintendent who told those little peanut farmers’ children that one of them could grow up to be President of the United States one day – and one did.

It’s a long way from Trump Tower

And so are we. We did make it to Tallahassee last night…and will use our GPS to find our way to Gainesville today.

Stay tuned for Lady Gamecock updates tomorrow.