Marching through Georgia

The mysterious High Sheriffs of Comparatively Clement Weather who have cast such a beneficent eye on this undertaking since we left the West appear to be taking a day off. News reports suggested that unmediated Atlanta would be unendurable today, and our brief experience of the motel parking lot bear these out. We have accordingly retired to our rather austere rooms in this Motel 6, parked ourselves near the (also) rather austere air conditioners, and await sundown. Fortunately Atlanta was always conceived as a layover and not a target: no ties of friendship or consanguinity detain us here, and while the city is undoubtedly pocked with must-see features of a cultural and/or historical character, the fact that none of us can bring any to mind serves as a further disincentive to aggressive exploration in the heat of the day.

We followed Interstate 75 from Bradenton, and what we noticed most from the minute we crossed the state line is that Lady Bird Johnson might as well never have lived as far as one could tell from the volume of outdoor advertising. I was put in mind of these lines from Ogden Nash:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all.

Tomorrow, on to Huntsville in neighboring Alabama, where we anticipate that the HS of CCW will again find us not.