On the Road Again . . .

March 18, 2013

Savannah to Pine Mountain, Georgia

Hooray!  Two months of daily radiation treatments in the rearview mirror, we are no longer tethered to Savannah.  It’s time to celebrate with a road trip.  

Our destination is Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, where we are hoping that spring will have sprung in joyous bloom, and our friends Joyce and Fred will be awaiting us in a cabin in the woods stocked with lots of wine and snacks.

But first, a stop along the way at the Warner Robins Museum of Aviation, where Dick yearns to get up close and personal with some of his most admired aircraft.

He waxes eloquent on the SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that flies at three times the speed of sound 85,000 feet in the air, its “skin” reaching temperatures in the range of 1,200 degrees:  “Form follows function, and something made to fly like that has to be beautiful, like a bird.”  Unfortunately, although it is awesome to look it--up close, from above and below--we are disappointed that there is no way we can figure out to capture the Blackbird’s majesty photographically, given the way it is displayed in the crowded hangar.

I find my muse in the plane nose art (but manage to resist buying the book on nose art in the gift shop, displayed just like a Cosmopolitan magazine in the Publix checkout line--a piece of poster board covering the racy cover shot).

We arrive at our Callaway Gardens cottage in the woods just in time for cocktail hour on the porch, thunder rolling in, then rain plashing with increasing intensity, until we hit the ultimate moment of drama--a power failure plunging us into dusky darkness.  An hour later, now in deep moonless darkness, we give up on waiting for the lights, and find our way to dinner at a place that still has power. All the lights are blazing in our cottage upon our return, allowing us to cap off the evening with a few rounds of Rummikub.