Sep 20 2012
Another day of covering
distance.
After ‘taking a ‘hike’ around the
truck-stop to ward off kinks, I got back on the road this morning expecting to
deal with morning rush in Montgomery AL, but it never really materialized, at
least not the rush I’m used to. In fact I passed a sign saying Montgomery was 8
miles ahead but I was still in deep woods with no indication there was a
city anywhere around! I guess having grown up in the sprawled population of
southeastern Michigan and spending the last 30 years in and around Houston, the
4th largest city in the country, has skewed my expectations a
little.
Just after crossing the
Alabama/Georgia line I saw a sign for the KIA exit. I’m sitting there trying to
figure out why someone named a road Killed-In-Action when I burst out of the
trees and to the left saw a massive assembly plant for KIA automobiles. This
place is so big they built dedicated two lane wide ramps for it off the freeway!
Somewhere between there and Atlanta
I noticed that I could not get by a single on-ramp anymore without someone coming down
it and wanting my space on the freeway, not that there was a lot of free space on
the freeway now anyway. There were so many people around I began to get the
jitters! (For the last 10 years we have lived 100 miles outside the city and I
timed my excursions into Houston so I arrived at the beginning of the week in
the dark of pre-dawn before most had gotten up and left at the end of the week before most of them got off work.)
After watching the cars get ever
thicker on the road for most of the day, especially when I was skirting around Atlanta, I finally
stopped at the Crosswinds campground just north of Salisbury NC. It was a bit
of a challenge stopping there since roadwork had completely re-arraigned
everything in the area so the directions in The Book were of no use at all. (Y'all know The Book, the Trailer Life Campground Guide.)
It was worth the effort though. It’s not
often you find a private campground set back away from the main roads and laid
out in the woods with untouched buffer zones between the sites, much like the state
forest campground at Monocle Lake Michigan used to be. Crosswinds even had
a small lake tucked into the trees and some short trails leading down through
the woods to it.
I didn’t stay down there by the lake
long though. Across the far side stretched some high voltage
electric lines and in the silence I could actually hear them crackling. I’ve worked
closely, very closely, with electricity my entire professional career, but it
was still creepy hearing those electrons trying to get loose!
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