Saturday, June 15. Day 11: From the Atlantic to Roswell, GA

 

Today was mostly a driving day. We got up around 7:30, had hotel breakfast and packed up, and around 8:30 went for one last walk along the beach right outside the hotel for 45 minutes or so, enjoying having our feet in the water for the last time. It was still cool and a bit breezy but sunny, not cloudy like almost every other early morning, so it was a very nice send-off. We then took off (after having noticed with pleasure that the hotel, which we really liked a lot all around, hadn’t even charged us the extra weekend rate that they had quoted us when we extended our stay to two nights), and drove the interstate up to Savannah, then across to Macon and Atlanta, with just one stop for a quick Subway lunch. The traffic was fine for the first five hours out of six or so, but around Atlanta we had several slowdowns despite the fact that we took the loop around Atlanta to get to Roswell, where Mark’s brother Jerry and his wife LuAnn live. 

We found their place without a problem and arrived around 4:30; sat around and chitchatted for a bit and then took off for a really wonderful dinner at a bakery / pasta place with really nice pasta and salads and a fantastic dessert bakery that had many dozens of European-style cakes and tarts on display. We finally settled on a turtle cheesecake (I had salmon on a bed of arugula salad for an entrée, and Mark had lovely stuffed shells), and it was very yummy. After dinner, Jerry and LuAnn took us on a little driving tour of their town, starting with their new house on the outer edge of the area in a semi-rural subdivision (we just drove by–we couldn’t go in; they close Tuesday, so it’s not officially theirs yet), and then moving on to LuAnn’s work place, a house that’s been converted into a hair salon. We went there mostly because a major storm hit the area a couple of days ago, and both the garage next door and a house across the street had been destroyed by huge, mature trees falling over. They have been sawed into chunks by now, but the tree across the street was clearly very old (160 years is the estimate we heard) and enormous, so the damage was impressive. We later saw other toppled trees in other parts of Roswell, as we got the tour of the historic part of town. There is a very cute restaurants-and-galleries upscale downtown that was packed when we drove through it, as well as some classic upper-class antebellum houses, including a (fairly modest, but well-preserved) plantation and a partly restored cotton mill/clothing factory that has been made into a park with a covered bridge and some nature trails. Just like in the South, I am a little bit uncomfortable with the fact that all these places are admired for their historicity and their beautiful architecture when what I am thinking about as I walk around is slavery and the reasons for the Civil War; the cotton mill that was restored was burned down by the Union soldiers because it was found to be making Confederate uniforms, but I never did find out whether it was employed labor or slave labor that kept it going. Likewise, the plantation had great documentation, but I couldn’t find signage for the “servants’ quarters” back behind the main building, the kitchen house, the well, and the guesthouse. 

After the tour of Roswell, we went back to Jerry and LuAnn’s current house (a rental, but with enough space for a guest room/study with its own bathroom, where they very kindly put us up), chitchatted a bit more, and went to bed around 10.