Corner To Corner - Chapter 2, the Deep South

After a restful quiet night at the Holiday Inn Express, Tampa Airport Runway, (it is literally right under the North aproach) we got up about 6am and enjoyed the standard free breakfast bar, loaded up the bikes and headed out. I’d spent the night before plotting a course that would take us, I hoped, up into Northeast Georgia near Augusta. I wanted to avoid Jacksonville, Florida, and any other big city, so unfortunately we couldn’t go through the Ocala National Forest like I would have liked to. Right outside our hotel was a ramp to the Veterans Expressway, so we took it – unfortunately it was a ramp that went South, rather than North, and the toll-booth didn’t have an automatic Sun Pass reader. In those cases, you are supposed to roll up to a staffed booth and the reader scans the pass and opens the gate, while the person in the booth sits and reads a trashy novel. Well in our case, the reader didn’t read the Sun Pass, so I had to get Mabel’s attention in the booth. I pointed out the Sun Pass and she said “What’s that, I’ve never seen one”, and I had to convince her, by showing her the large SUN PASS logo on it, that it was indeed real. I can tell the training department at Florida DOT is on the ball! She wrote down the unit number and opened the gate. She had to do the same thing for Tony. However, since we were going the wrong direction, we did a U-turn in the toll plaza and went back the other way and through an automatic Sun Pass reader that didn’t read it again. Nor did the reader on any of the other 5 toll booths we went through. I’m sure Florida DOT is going to have a field day with us.

When we got turned around and heading north on Veterans I remembered how nice this part of Florida really is. Very green, very quiet and lush and the cool morning air made it a joy to ride. At one point as we were winding north on US-41 through some rolling hills passing some horse farms and nice homes, I had to ask Tony if we were still in Florida, as it felt like the hills around Lexington, Kentucky. The picture that starts this posting was taken along that stretch. As we pulled into Floral City we went passed one of those signs that explain how people get lost. We were going east into the sun, and the sign said, US-41 North, US 98 South. Huh?

As we neared the outskirts of Ocala it started to warm up, and the wide six lane road was reflecting a lot of heat back up on to us. Combine that with the heat from the V-twin engines, and the heat pounding down on you, it can get uncomfortable quickly in city traffic. I was hearing the lyric to a Jackson Browne song called “Loadout” where he sings about being on the road for a long time, saying their next show was “in Chicago, or Detroit, I don’t know, these towns all look the same…” Indeed they do these days, especially the miles of “big box” stores along major routes – Home Depot, Lowes, Kohls, Bed Bath and Beyond, Wall Mart, Target, and so on. Tony said that Ocala when he was a kid was just a small farming town. Not any more.

We kept rolling northward through Central Florida on US-41 and US 301, through a number of farming towns and it kept getting warmer. We’d stop for an occasional bottle of water in the shade of a mini-mart or gas station, and we finally crossed the state line just outside of Folkstone, Georgia. We’d come 218 miles so far today, and add that to the 423 yesterday from Key West and we’ve driven the total length of state – 641 miles by our route.

We had to gas up and get some lunch in Folkstone, so at the gas station, I asked the young man on the other side of my pump if he was from here, and he said, with the absolute deepest southern drawl that “yessir” he was. This is the deep south – since, as Tony says, Florida is South of the South, and thus not “southern” and we were just over the line in Georgia, this was about as “deep” south as you can get I figure. So I asked him if he had a good local recommendation for lunch, to which he replied, “Yessir.. ya’ll see that brick church over there, just passed it is the best place in town, called the Okefenokee Restaurant, y'all can eat off the menu or the buffet, and I’d say the buffet.” We thanked him and he hopped in his pick up and drove off. So we motored down to the Ofekenokee and parked the bikes and ambled in. The very sweet Kathy showed us to our table and asked if we’d be doing the buffet, to which we said yes. She said, it’s $7.50 each and help yourself. “Y’all want sweet tea?” and we said of course. The buffet was actually quite good, and the catfish were out of this world, as was the fried chicken. When it came time to go, Carrie noticed our shirts (those fantastic “Gary and Tony’s Corner To Corner Ride” ones that you can get on line at http://cafepress.com/tonyaandgary.) She said “cool shirt”, so I explained what it meant and wrote down the address for this blog, and asked if I could put their picture in. They said yes, as long as they had veto power. They liked this one, so here you go, Kathy and Carrie at the Ofekenokee Restaurant in Folkstone, GA. If you are in that neck of the woods, it’s the place to eat. I have to say though that the only disappointment was that they did not have any Peach Pie. This is Georgia for crying out loud, what kind of self-respecting southern restaurant doesn’t have Peach Pie? But I forgave them with their very sincere apology for not having any. Thanks Kathy and Carrie!

We got back on the bikes, much fuller and satisfied, and it had warmed up even more. This part of Georgia is Baptist Country. Actually I think all of Georgia is Baptist Country, but it seemed like every hundred yards there was a Baptist church. Most had reader boards, so I was commanded to be SAVED, or to OBEY, or to ACCEPT HIM, several times a mile. I was tempted to stop and be baptized on more than one occasion figuring getting wet would cool me off for a few miles, and I could stop at a different church every time I dried off, and the ride would be much more comfortable.

We headed north on US-1 (same road as off the Keys), heading towards Northeast Georgia. As we rode along it got hotter and hotter, until we had to stop an hour later in Alma, Georgia to cool off and get some water. Once we stepped into the Min-mart I didn’t want to leave. I guzzled two bottles of water and we bought one more, and once we got outside, Tony was able to approximate a Catholic baptism by spraying us both down with the contents of the bottle to the amusement of the Georgia State Patrolman and Min-mart cashier. The patrolman said it was the hottest day of the year so far and you could see it in the air. He was right. He wished us well and told us "y'all have a safe ride home".


Tony took this picture as we left Alma, and the "haze" in the picture is not pollution it is actually the heat and humidity. We seriously debated whether or not to get in out of the heat for a while, but decided to tough it out until the next town. And after we hit the road, and after the baptism had worn off, it wasn’t so bad so we kept going. We stayed on US-1, which by this time had combined with US-23 and GA-4 so the road signs were 1-23-4! In Wrens, GA we picked up GA-17 and it suddenly turned cooler and very pleasant. This stretch of rural Georgia was just as I’d pictured it – houses with no foundations on cinder blocks, red clay roads, and pine trees. It was a nice ride for 25 miles to Thomson.

We rolled into Thomson and found a nice Holiday Inn Express and checked in. What is it about Southerners? They are just so darn friendly! Either that or they are gay. You can’t tell. Tony says they are nice, and then after two drinks they are gay. Our desk clerk was no exception. Picture the actor Leslie Jordan, (from the movie Sordid Lives, and TV show Boston Legal) only a bit more masculine. After checking us in and chatting about the weather and the hotel, I asked him “if he could eat anywhere in town where would it be?” And without missing a beat he said “Augusta” (which is 30 miles east). I said, come on, there has to be a good local restaurant in town, and he said actually the Chinese Buffet in the parking lot was about the best we could do if we didn’t want fast-food. Then he gave us a goody bag of “snacks for later” and even signed me up for the Holiday Inn Express point program. Just what I need, another affinity program, but given we’ll likely be in these for quite a bit on this trip it does make sense. He let us park the bikes under the portico as well so he could keep an eye on them.
He was right about the Chinese Buffet too. It was actually quite good, and although the sauce for the sweet and sour was a bit too red (picturing Fred Willard in the movie Waiting for Guffman), it was tasty and filling.

Tomorrow we’ll head northeast again, and get into South Carolina, where we’ll ride what the Harley Ride Atlas has nice green colored road which is their cue for a good motorcycle road towards Asheville, North Carolina and up the Blue Ridge Parkway. After tomorrow I will have been in all but three states in the lower 48 – Kansas, South Dakota, and Alabama. I’m hoping that Southern hospitality continues to find us as we head north.