Atlanta Georgia

May 12 2018

After a day of scurrying around repacking we left home for the 2^nd time this week. Our destination is Fort Rucker Alabama, but we will make a couple stops along the way.

Our first day is our longest travel day; we traveled just shy of 400 miles from Myrtle Beach to Atlanta Georgia. It was a boring all day interstate highway trip. We passed the time listening to an audio book called “The girl on the train” by Paula Hawkins. By the time we got to Atlanta we were about half way through it. It’s a strange story.

Our campground is on the east side of the city in Stone Mountain Park. The temperature was in the 90’s on Saturday afternoon so we decided to wait until morning for our planned visit to the carvings of the Confederate generals. 

The centerpiece of the park is Stone Mountain, a dome of exposed granite. It rises sharply over 600 feet above the surrounding terrain and is known for its barren sides. On its northern face is a large carving.  It depicts three Confederate leaders of the Civil War: President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.

It is known as the Confederate Memorial, but there are no public displays of any kind mentioning the Civil War. Stone mountain Park has been transformed into a kind of amusement park and it is blatantly obvious they are downplaying the carving.

We rode the cable car to the summit of the mountain and walked among the other tourists on the barren rock. We took the obligatory picture of ourselves with the Atlanta skyline in the background. You may notice the crude editing on the right side, we got photo bombed by a giant woman caught pulling spandex out of her butt crack. I erased her from the picture but the image will be with me for some time, lol.

In the afternoon we drove into the city and took a 90 minute bus tour of the major attractions. It was just as obvious on the tour that Atlanta is attempting to forget about the Civil War. There was no reference to any militarily historic sites, or any prominent people from that era. 

Our tour guides, one black the other white were painting such a rosy picture of contemporary Atlanta that we never asked them about the erasing of history, specifically Civil War history. I am of the assumption that the citizens, many who have ancestors who were slaves or confederates coexist here by not mentioning it. Maybe that’s the best way for them to move forward.