May 12 2018
After a day of scurrying around repacking we left home for
the 2nd 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.
