Reidsville, GA

March 6, 2010

We left Savannah yesterday. Probably just as well, as the city is preparing for St. Patrick’s Day. This is the nation’s second largest celebration of the green, and they do it VERY well! If you aren’t ready to join in, you’d best get out of the way.

President Obama was here this past week. Didn’t seem to create much of a stir locally. I talked to several folks about it and mainly they just wanted to know why he was here.

It may be warming up, finally. The night time temp is still between 26 and 36 degrees. we’re amused at how the cold affects the locals. I can’t believe they would even SELL fur trimmed parkas in this part of the country! Florida is chilly, too, and in an RV resort, you’ll find most of the snow birds are on blood thinners!

On our way to our next stop, we traveled Hwy. 204/280 through the communities of Ella Bell, Pembroke, Daisy, Claxton and Hagen. This is raw country. No, actually it is kind of ugly. Lots of scraggle pine and dirty roadside bogs. These rural parts of Georgia are very poor; houses are old single wides or decrepit little crooked boxes. I’ve been in waiting rooms and heard women talk about their mothers getting $256 a month from Social Security.  It’s hard to even think about that; can you imagine…?

There are cotton fields out here, 60 miles west of Savannah. Georgia Pacific is around close; we see trucks full of sagging, scraggle trees, good only for chipping. The road is newly resurfaced with stimulus money. Religion is a vital part of the society, as evidenced by the Upper Room Deliverance Center and the Prince of Peace Lumber Yard.

So here we are in Reidsville, Georgia, at a tiny little State Park (29 spaces) that hasn’t had a map since 2006, and they still have 1,000 maps left out of a shipment of 3,000. Hmmmmm. (Reps don’t like to work a park where they can’t make any money.) The last map had four ads. I’m up for the challenge.

I’m not getting as much done as I used to. Quilting and painting have sort of given way to afternoon naps. Plus, our kids went together and got us a 68 inch (seems like) flat screen TV that holds me like a magnet. My eyes were rectangular slits by the time the Olympics were over. And I was TIRED! Remember, we’re on east coast time and I had to see it all, live events, recaps and reruns of the early stuff I missed. We watched a lot of curling and really liked it.

We are parked on a little lake, daffodils are blooming all around, the happy little eastern Blue Bird is at my feeder, and both Dave and I are over our colds. Life is good.

Love, Sam