We celebrated New Year's Eve together with our "host family" at a party in the Hawkins lounge car of the train (an appropriate setting for the occasion). Good friends, food, fun, some wine...and no, we did not see the ball drop! While the rest of Georgia was having their traditional Black-eyed Peas for New Year's Day dinner, we stuck with our usual pork and sauerkraut for good luck.
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| Hawkins Car |
To get ready for the new year, everything in the commissary car was taken to the depot to be inventoried...thousands of thimbles, key chains, magnets, train whistles, etc. We made an assembly line with the other hosts to fold, bag, label and price a few hundred new t-shirts. While the other hosts assembled new shelving and rearranged the gift shop, I painted the new Director's office. We worked, but with a lot of chatter and laughing...so it didn't really feel like WORK.
The excursion in February was on Valentine's Day and we served a spaghetti dinner to 50 passengers in the Americus Dining Car. White tablecloths, crystal, no paper plates or plastic (and no kiddos!) The train stopped over the lake so they could watch the sunset, and thanks to a beautiful clear evening we were treated to a full moon on the way back. The only casualty of the night was a handful of dessert forks that slipped off a stack of plates just as the host was carrying them across the vestibule between cars. We're guessing that they're lying on the tracks somewhere near Cobb!
On Sundays, if the weather is clear, you can find a half dozen or so men at the park's model airplane field. It's fun to watch them perform. This one had a six foot wing span. Some of the men have trailers to carry their planes and all their tools. I think that may be the only thing keeping it from becoming Keith's new hobby!?! (The plane on the ground is part of the plane and artillery display at GA Veterans Park.)
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| Boys and their Toys |
We took advantage of our down time in February to do some sightseeing. One of the local sights that we pass every time we go to town is the Norbord plant, an international producer of wood-based panels. Trucks loaded with pine trees arrive every day and sometimes they get backed-up.
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| Trucks backed up onto the highway |
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| To the right, behind the first truck is the huge pile of trees |
We visited Andersonville Prisoner of War Museum and Cemetery. This was the site of the Union Army prisoner camp built in February, 1864 to hold 10,000 men. Within six months, it held over 30,000 prisoners in what the men called "hell on earth." Confined soldiers suffered terribly from over-crowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate food. Most prisoners died from disease, starvation, or exposure.
Americus, a small town on our train route, is the home of the Habitat for Humanity International's Headquarters and Global Village. Here they've constructed life-sized replicas of Habitat houses from around the world. Each house is as unique as the country it comes from, most consisting of only one or two rooms. We found it interesting to find one with a light bulb installed in the ceiling in anticipation of the day when they might get electricity.
On a beautiful warm day, we drove to Providence Canyon located west of us near the Alabama border. Known as Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon," the soil's pink, orange, red and purple hues make it a colorful natural painting. It's believed that the canyon may have been created by poor agricultural practices years ago.
Located in Leslie, a tiny town of only 300 residents, about ten miles from the park, is the Georgia Rural Telephone Museum. Housed in a renovated 1920's cotton warehouse, it has the largest, oldest and rarest examples of tele-communication in the world dating from 1876 to the present. The museum was founded in 1995 by Tommy C Smith who has owned and operated the Citizens Telephone Co. since 1946. The museum houses about 2000 telephones and other communication equipment dating back to when Alexander Graham Bell and others began developing such devices. There's also a one-of-a-kind 50-line switchboard from 1880. Having worn a telephone headset at work for over fifteen years, I was especially amused to see one of the first operator headsets.
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| I'm thinking "Chiropractor" |
