Friday, June 24, 2011
381.2 miles
I got out the door at 8:37 am.
Friday's first stop was Plains, Georgia, and the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site.
I got there almost exactly at opening (9:00 am)
 | The visitor center is inside the old Plains High School. | |
| Here was a recreated classroom. It reminded me of my own 4th grade at Lincoln Later Elementary in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Other exhibits in other classrooms traced Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter's lives, focusing on different aspects. I learned a lot and really enjoyed it! Later, I asked a ranger where students go to school now that the building is a museum. The answer is that the small-town schools were consolidated, and students go to Americus for school now. |  | |
 | My next stop was the Plains Depot, headquartes of Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign. | |
| After the school and the depot, I drove outside of town to see Jimmy Carter's boyhood farm. I was the only visitor there. |  | |
 | The first stop at the boyhood farm is a tour of Jimmy Carter's boyhood house. Most interesting was seeing an indoor bathroom with a shower made from a bucket with holes in the bottom! | |
| Other parts of the site included a store, a barn, a field, animals, and a neighbor's/worker's house. It got to chat with one of the ranger-farmers. It was surprising to hear how new the site actually is! |  | |
 | My biggest question of all was why there were peacocks on the site! Answer from the ranger: The Carters had a peacock when they lived here, so someone believed there still should be one! |
From the boyhood farm, it was a 40-minute drive to my next stop, the Andersonville National Historic Site.
It was a very hot, sunny, humid Georgia summer day.
| My first stop was the Andersonville visitor center, which includes information on the historic Confederate prison and the National POW Museum. The museum is very moving and really caused me to think about how past Americans have been treated as POWs and how we as Americans should treat POWs in our care. |  | |
 | After the visitor center and museum, I got in my car to drive around the prison site. This was the best overview photo I could get, showing memorials, the recreated gate, and much of the land that was the prison. Most surprising to me was that the land wasn't flat! | |
| In one corner of the stockade site, the terrible conditions of the "housing" for the prisoners has been recreated. |  | |
 | Another corner of the stockade has memorials to prisoners. It was interesting to learn of Clara Barton's work to identify the dead here. | |
| When I think of a prison, I think of a modern prison with running water, buildings, and toilets. Andersonville didn't have any of these. This creek ran through the prison site and was the water for the prisoners. Standing in this part of the prison site was the most evocative. It's a place of snakes now; I assume it was also a place of snakes then. |  | |
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| My final stop at Andersonville was to drive through the National Cemetery. It was amazing to see how few of the markers say Unknown (only 460 out of nearly 12,000). Also interesting to see was the similarities between the original wooden grave markers and the current markers. | ||
I left Andersonville around 12:30 pm and drove to to Orlando.
I stopped for a strawberry milkshake and gas in Cordele, Georgia.
In Valdosta, Georgia, I got gas for $3.429/gal.
I made it to my hotel, the Holiday Inn Express Nearest Universal, by 7:30 pm.
It is VERY easy to reach from the highway. I chose it because it was within walking distance of
Universal Studios and included parking.
 | Here is my room with one king bed on the ninth floor. It had a great view! | |
| The room had a TV with cable, a small closet, a comfortable bed, chair, bathroom with roomy shower, and wifi. |  | |
 | One of the best features of my room was the amazing view of both Universal Studios Islands of Adventure, the highway, and the storms that continually rolled in during my two-night stay. |
| Back to Itinerary | On to Day 7 |