Chick’ns an’ Gators…

We be discovering southern Georgia, and loving the balmy, warm weather.
We’re back in a small town (Douglas, GA is 10,000), set up in General
Coffee State Park, a longleaf pine flatwoods, full of blooming dogwood
and azaleas. The oak and sweet gum trees are not quite green yet, so
they look somewhat ghostly, decked out in drippy, gray moss. The forest
floor is scattered with lime green saw palmetto. It’s a sandy floor,
for the most part, home to the gopher tortoise and a lot of snakes,
mainly the eastern diamondback rattler. The park hosts one of the
world’s largest magnolia trees, but I haven’t found it yet.

We see a lot of swamps along the roads, and they say the gators are now
coming out of hibernation. The water table is very high here and I’m
surprised there aren’t more mosquitoes. Where stately homes in middle
Georgia have a circular driveway, homes here have a little lake in
front.

The park has a little heritage farm with original buildings and tools
used by “yeoman” farmers in the mid-1800s. They also have a museum of
naval war stores, which we have learned are mainly the tools involved
in tapping longleaf and slash pine trees to get the turpentine and gum
used for ship building in the nineteenth century.

We’re only about 40 miles above the Okeefenokee Swamp, which sits just
above the Florida border. We’re headed that way today, down to
Waycross. Yesterday we went to a raptor show given by a SOAR group. It
was volunteer appreciation day at the park. Then we drove to
Fitzgerald, GA for the Wild Chicken Festival. (Fitzgerald is also home
to the Spittin’ Image Tabernacle. No joke.) In the early 1960s,
somebody imported Burmese Game Cocks with the plan to hunt them like
Quail. That didn’t work out but apparently the chickens were hard to
round up. They eventually came to town and now they number about 900.
They roost in the trees and shrubs all over town (although it appears
there are not too many in the black section of town), and some people
are wanting to get rid of them. We were tempted to mention Anson
McCook’s “a buck a duck” plan for Drake Park but seeing as how these
folks are celebrating their chickens, we didn’t. We watched the hot
wing eating contest but skipped the boiled egg eating contest. We were
sorely disappointed that the State Prison Cloggers didn’t show up as
billed. There were conflicting stories as to what happened.

Coca cola is sweeter here. Doesn’t seem to matter whether it is bottled
or fountain. Of course, sweet iced tea is the drink of choice here. And
it’s really sweet. We missed the Fire Ant Festival in Ambrose, but feel
sure there is more here to entertain us.

The job is going well. I even got 100 bucks out of Tidwell Carter for
the ad he bought last year and never paid for. Tidwell was so stunned
it amused me. I may have left him with the impression that I was going
to be back every month to collect a payment.I was very polite and
smiled a lot.

Love to all. We watch the weather channel every morning and feel your
pain as best we can. Which is probably not very well. Our lives have
been so much easier since we signed up for this internet service that
gives us access like a cell phone and works every day no matter where
we are. No more trying to steal a signal or driving miles to hunt down
an internet cafe.

Sam