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We went for a ride along the Chattahoochee River on Saturday, a nice 43-mile ride. The river looks like this:
And part of the ride looks like this:
Of course, as we have noted in this space before, we only go over there to ride for the breakfast. When in Columbus, visit the nice people at Plucked Up Chicken and Biscuits. You’ll thank me for it later.
Baseball that night:
And the days turn to nights and the days after, faster and faster.
There are four entries on the marker site for you to check out today. First, there’s The Bottle, which is one of those first curiosities you see in town if you come by a certain route.
Across the street is just a regular convenience store. On the sign you learn there that The Bottle, a place with a great deal of character to it in the old roadside Americana vein, burned in the 1930s. What’s there now is the most Alabama thing you could possibly do with the space. See more about The Bottle here.
See more about ths Rosenwald school here. The schools were named for Julius Rosenwald, president and later chairman of Sears Roebuck & Co., who, along with Booker T. Washington, started the program. There were more than 5,000 Rosenwald schools built nationally and a few hundred of those were established throughout Alabama. This was the first one. To read more about the Alabama version, click here. You can see a slightly better version of the photo in the marker here.
And just down the road from that is the Loachapoka Historic District. It was a railroad boom town, which meant it was also a railroad bust town. There are two markers within a few feet of one another here.
It’s a sleepy little piece of sand now. You can see the markers here. Also, in the local Native American dialect, Muskogee, Loachapoka means “turtle killing place.”
When you have the chance to take a lazy trip around town on your bicycle just because, you should take it. You get good views if you stick your head into the wind and look around:
I write this down just because I have to somehow remind myself of this from time to time.
Here’s another thing I should remind myself about. One of my favorite things about Great Big Story is how they use crafted visuals to help tell their story. Like this one, for example.
We got in about 60 miles on the bikes this weekend. We went over to Columbus on Saturday, a beautiful, warm day, to ride the bulk of it. Here is the Riverwalk:
You have to time this right so you can either avoid, or run into, the maximum amount of pedestrians. Your windows are narrow over there. But look at that sky!
I thought I would take a selfie. And I did, but this one turned out even cooler:
I guess I pressed the shutter button before the sensor compensated for the light. That white background is not Photoshopped, that’s just the way it turned out.
My Specialized and the Chattahoochee:
Really we go over to Columbus to ride for the late breakfast after. Can we talk food for a second? Let’s talk food for a second. As a baby, I gave up the bottle relatively quickly. And — being raised in the deep, deep, deeeeep South — I was probably weened on biscuits and gravy. So understand: I have a frame of reference here. Plucked Up Chicken & Biscuits has the best gravy biscuit I’ve ever tasted:
And I’m from the South, of course, so I know which I speak here. Also, someone thought it’d be a good idea to lightly batter some tender chicken and then put it in a spicy pineapple marmalade. This was a good idea:
Go have some. Seriously. It’ll change your day.
Today’s roses at home:
They just bloom and bloom and require nothing of us. Pretty incredible.
I’m working on wrapping up a project I’ve been undertaking, more off than on, for several years. I’ve been riding my bike all over the county to photograph the markers and the places they document. The ones I’m showing you today are all from the same place. So important is this location, there are three markers within view of one another.
Three signs in all, six sides of information, generations of families and leaders and history. Interesting how cemeteries are both the beginning and end of history.
You can see the other sides to these signs, and the sacred grounds they mark, here.
