After MAGAWeek2023 and my extended time out of town, I’ve decided to take this week to rerun some classic hits from the extensive TPP back catalog. Most of the posts are those with very high view counts, though I am presenting them in no particular order. TBT will proceed as usual, and regular posts will resume Saturday, 15 July 2023.
With that, here is 7 September 2021’s “Driving the Georgia Backroads“:
As noted in Saturday’s post, I spent the weekend in the woods. Specifically, my girlfriend, her friend, her friend’s husband, and I went camping at Watson Mill Bridge State Park outside of Comer, Georgia.
It was a rejuvenating experience. Last week was borderline hellacious, and by the end of it I was pretty much done with everything (’tis the season; thank goodness for Thanksgiving!). Spending two nights in the forest really cleansed my mind and soul. My body got a good workout on some vigorous woodland trails, though I also polluted it with plenty of s’mores and campfire hot dogs.
We stayed at one of the park’s three “pioneer” campsites, designed for primitive camping—camping without water or electricity (although I discovered a water spigot about one hundred feet from our camp, which I used to keep the dogs hydrated). Everything we cooked was over a fire, and the other couple was kitted out with all the necessities. The wife (you’ll see her in a picture below of me cooking over the fire) has been camping for years, and it is apparently one of her favorite activities, so she had all the gear necessary to cook and live outdoors (at least for a weekend).
Even at the primitive camp, and with a more experienced couple to help out, it was “easy mode” camping: we pulled our cars right up to the campsite, and it was a short walk to restrooms and showers in the main part of the camp. Still, I ended up going without a shower until we got out of the woods Sunday, but surprisingly did not smell like Bigfoot (even if I looked like him a bit).
Regardless, we definitely “roughed it,” as they say. We slept in very cold weather in our tents and sleeping bags (my sleeping bag was very warm), and even with some padding from an air mattress and yoga mats, I could definitely tell I was on the ground. The cold weather was glorious, though—there’s something invigorating about temperatures below fifty degrees Fahrenheit that gets the blood flowing. I woke up before everyone else Sunday morning and managed to get quite a bit of grading done at a picnic table, but not before taking a short walk around the park, during which I saw a white-tail deer prancing in the foliage (during the night, we heard coyotes in the distance; I was thankful not to see any of those).
As I noted in various updates about delayed posts, I was back in Athens, Georgia this weekend. On the way over Friday, my GPS routed me a different way than usual, apparently due to a massive wreck on I-20.
The rerouting took me off I-20 at Lexington, South Carolina, taking me through painfully slow traffic in the bustling county seat before spitting me out on US-378 West, which wended its way towards the Upstate.
I then hit US-178 West towards Greenwood and Abbeville, transferring to various State roads. I eventually ended up on SC-72, heading through Calhoun Falls at the South Carolina-Georgia border.
At that point, SC-72 became GA-72, which took me through Elberton and Comer, Georgia, before depositing me in Athens.
As many of my readers are not from South Carolina—or even from this country!—let me translate that for you: I went through a lot of small towns in very rural parts of South Carolina and Georgia.
Murphy and I spent this Labor Day Weekend visiting my girlfriend and her German Shepherd in Athens, Georgia, which is about three-and-a-half hours from Lamar. As such, I spent a solid seven or so hours on the road this weekend, not counting time we spent tooling around Athens.
For a three-day weekend, that’s not much driving, and I’ve driven longer distances. Way back in the mists of graduate school, circa 2006 or 2007, I drove from Knoxville, Tennessee to Rock Hill, South Carolina (not far), then from Rock Hill to Richmond, Virginia and back just to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra with a friend. She took the wheel only for the last hour of the drive back, and apparently as soon as I got into the passenger seat, I was out cold.
Granted, I was twenty-one or twenty-two at the time. In the intervening fifteen years, my zest for driving all night to hear live symphonic holiday power metal has waned considerably. Now I’m lucky if I can make it to 10:30 PM without falling asleep on the couch, my multiple after-school drives to Universal Studios notwithstanding.
But I digress. While I may lack the stamina of my reckless youth, I do alternatively loathe and appreciate a long drive.
Apologies to readers for some delayed posts Saturday and Monday. I will be working to get those finished today and tomorrow, and to get back on my regular posting schedule. Even this short update post is a bit delayed.
I spent the entire weekend helping my girlfriend move to her new apartment, and while it was one of the easier moves I’ve done in terms of furniture heft, it was also a situation of Murphy’s Law: what could go wrong, did (well, not entirely—I suppose the U-Haul could have exploded en route). We made an initial run Friday morning to drop off a small load and to get the keys to her new place. It turns out there were several bits of documentation that the various utility providers had either not sent or did which my girlfriend did not realize she needed until the night before, but fortunately that all got sorted fairly quickly and headed back to South Carolina for the big load.
Unfortunately, when we arrived at the U-Haul pickup location, the place was totally dark—and this was at 3:30 PM. There was also a massive storm system rolling in, with lightning popping in the area as we waited despondently on the off-chance the proprietor of the fly-by-night used car lot where my girlfriend had made the reservation would show up.
When it became apparent this mystery proprietor was not going to materialize miraculously, I began calling every U-Haul location in the general vicinity. On the fourth attempt, I got through to a location. They did not have a twenty-foot truck, but were able to place a reservation for me at a location that was a mere half-mile away from the shuttered used car lot. As the storm began to shower its sky babies upon us, we booked it to a U-Haul Super Center and got the twenty-foot truck, which I drove gingerly through the downpour to my girlfriend’s apartment.
(An aside: I love U-Haul trucks, with their lower storage cabins and their easy-to-drive cabins. What I do not love is the willy-nilly fashion in which U-Haul hands out franchises to every Tom, Dick, and Skeletor out there. Virtually every move I’ve ever made has involved going to a seedy, dilapidated, remote location, and asking the surly gas station/hardware store/dirt-floor shack attendant to give me the keys to the truck. There’s always something unseemly about it—it’s like buying drugs, or purchasing an escort [I don’t know what those things are like, to be clear, but I’ve watched enough 70s movies to get the idea]. One time I picked up a U-Haul at a shack with a literal dirt floor and one bare light bulb burning overhead. I’m surprised I made it out of there alive, much less with a truck!)
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Last weekend, whilst pitching a fit about work, my girlfriend and I were exploring Athens, Georgia. I’ve already detailed one part of that adventure, our trip to the Bizarro-Wuxtrey, a downtown comic book store with a great collection (and where I picked up Dracula: Vlad the Impaler, which I devoured liked the Count descending upon one of his victims).
The trip was a fun adventure through the famous college town and its environs. It has been many years since I’ve been to Athens, and even then it was just to the University of Georgia campus to play in the University of South Carolina marching band, The Mighty Sound of the Southeast. I don’t remember anything about it other than some vague memories of the buildings on campus, so this trip to Athens was really like going for the first time.
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This past weekend I went to Athens, Georgia, with my girlfriend to see the sights. We spent a good bit of time in downtown Athens, near the University of Georgia campus, which was overrun with graduates and their families in town for a weekend of graduation ceremonies. Amid our sightseeing, we stumbled upon Bizarro-Wuxtrey, a comic book and record store that truly lives up to its name.
The first floor of the shop is Wuxtrey Records, a record shop that, due to Virus-related capacity restrictions, we were not able to browse. The second floor is—like Bizarro Superman—the comic book section. It was the classic comic book store, complete with an overweight, older gentleman with long hair and a beard manning the shabby little counter. The store features several rooms of comics and old magazines, including back issues of old niche magazines dedicated to sci-fi flicks and movie monsters.
Amid the stacks of new arrivals I found the subject of this post: the black-and-white reissue of the 1990s graphic novel Dracula: Vlad the Impaler.
The Portly Politico 