Macon is prettier than you might think. It's sort of an Albuquerque to Savannah's Santa Fe - rougher around the edges but made of the same charm.
Old houses here are immense. Maybe they knocked down all the little ones, maybe it was a far less egalitarian world back then, and these rich folks up on the hill were the anamoly, not the rule, but the size and scale and beauty of the homes here is formal and breathtaking. And then it evokes a nagging thought that labor to build these homes, the heavy labor anyway, was cheap. Really, really, horribly, awfully, cheap. Somehow that history feels closer in Southern Georgia, particularly in Macon, than other places I've been, though they were no less slave owners here than the folks in Raliegh or Atlanta or Montgomery.
Waking up early in the Hawthorn Inn off of Highway 75, which was creepy in a way I couldn't quite identify, I checked out and zipped out to the car. I really have no idea what it was, but I wanted to get away from the place as quickly as possible. Something in the geometry of the place, in the smell, in the gloom of the staff. If a room is bad enough to make the rental gold Chevy Malibu Maxx seem like a nice environment, you trust your gut and get on with it.
I pulled out of the parking lot of the hotel and into the similarly gloomy dunkin donuts next door. Passable espresso, passable crullers. In general I felt sort of bullied by Macon, and I was happy to get on the road to the meetings.
Meetings were productive, and mood improving steadily, I set out to get lost in downtown Macon before heading out to Albany. Ended up circling around the campus of Mercer College, which was beautiful. Lunch was a sub shop - Dawson's Subs, I think. Seemed to cater to the college crowd, which was a good sign. It's maybe the third sub I've had in Georgia, and they all are traditional deli style - the meets are arrayed still whole, and they cut the slices to order with a large deli-slicer. It was a tasty sub, and it felt good to be in a place that bore some evidence of being handled by an actual owner. The walls were decorated with old board games, pieces neatly glued into place. I ate under a sort of yellowing Sorry! board, and the booth next to mine had a Star Wars: The Board Game above it. The booths themselves were old and hard, and it looked to me like the place had been in more or less constant use since Sorry! and Star Wars: The Board Game were in common circulation. Maybe 20 or 25 years? I mistakenly ordered a "whole" rather than a "half" sandwhich. I'm not sure what the term "whole" was intended to mean. Sliced in half it neatly covered an entire large plate. A "whole" busload of hungry people, maybe. I ate the first half, and then took a bite out of the second, if only so that the people working there wouldn't think I was a wasteful idiot who could have done just as well with a half. Why I cared about what the people behind the counter thought about my spending habits, and why I thought that they would take any notice at all of the amount of food I threw away on my way out of the store will be sorted out at some yet to be defined point in the future.
Thusly fed, I set out for Albany, about 2 hours south.
It was (and is) a gorgeous day in Georgia, and my room in the cheap, but not at all creepy, Albany Mall Holiday Inn lets in nice light. The windows even open. I opted for a restaurant a short walk away for dinner. The Rocket. Sort of like Dawson's, it was without art or pretense, someone's effort at a little business. The Rocket, if anything, had even more heart. Its a standalone building, square and squat, standing out in the middle of it's parking lot, looking a little like a Chili's or TGI Fridays. The theme of the place is kitchy space, and they take the theme far enough that my reciept reads Aliens, Peaches In Space, and well, side salad, but side salad was the only descriptively named item on the menu. Really. See the menu for yourself. It was one of those places though, where the kitch is maybe not as consistent as it could be. You get a menu like that, you sort of want goofy 60's lighting and checkerboard lineloeum floor. You want it to ooze space, to get the joke, to really embrace the thing. But to me, the effort was timid, and the result was a place that seemed like it was build by someone who really wanted to please everyone. Still, it felt much better than being stamped and churned through the turnstile of the big chains.
I walked back to the hotel after dinner, taking a couple of turns off of the shortest route to see what was there, and to breathe and feel the breeze. It was a nice walk.
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