Lavonia, Georgia

 

I completed my slate of Carnegies in Georgia with a dandy in Lavonia.  It gave me my first spontaneous “wow” of the trip when I came around a bend and spotted this multi-tiered original facing the road heading southeast out of this quiet town towards South Carolina.  It was a Sunday, so I didn’t have the pleasure of luxuriating in its interior, but its exterior was so satisfyingly distinctive it hardly mattered.  The only disappointment was its WiFi required a password, so I couldn’t sit in its presence and catch up with the world.

Lavonia’s was the sixteenth of the twenty-three Carnegies still standing in the state that I visited on this trip. I’d gotten to five others on previous trips, leaving me two short of visiting them all.  They two missing are both in Savannah on the coast.  They would have required a considerable detour.  I left them for a future trip when I gather the remaining Carnegies I’ve missed in Florida north of Orlando along the coast.  

The Lavonia Carnegie was my second of the day.  The first came in Athens, home of the University of Georgia.  The Carnegie was on a satellite campus on the outskirts of town. It was built in 1905 for the Georgia State Normal School, which was taken over by the US Naval Supply Corps to train officers in the 1950s.  When the school relocated in 2011, it morphed into the campus for the University of Georgia Health Sciences.  

For a spell the Carnegie served as  the US Naval Supply Corps Museum, but is now the Carnegie Library Learning Center.  I have another correction to make on Wikipedia, which gave its address as 1401 Prince Street, the main street running along one side of the Campus, though the library is well within the campus on Fox Road.  There was no one about to ask its whereabouts.  It didn’t take me long though to spot it among the small cluster of buildings comprising the campus.

As I entered Athens a motorist stopped and gestured for me to stop before I sought out the library.  He was a fellow touring cyclist and invited me to pitch my tent in his yard.  It wasn’t even noon, way to early to curtail my riding.  But he was able to direct me to Prince Street and the campus, saving me several miles, as I had intended on continuing on into the heart of the city before going over to Prince.  If I had, I would have had to backtrack a ways.  

He was the second person of the day to flag me down.  The first was a state trooper who turned on his siren when I went through a red light after I had come to a complete stop and all the traffic had passed.  I told him I thought Georgia had adopted the Idaho Stop, that several states have, allowing cyclists to regard stop signs as yield signs and stop lights as stop signs.  He said, “No, no, no.  Bicyclists have to observe the same traffic laws as motorists in Georgia.”

He was cordial, pulling me over more to check me out than to give me a ticket, though he did call in my drivers license.  He could hardly believe I was biking all the way to Athens, thirty miles away.  I could hardly believe he was the first officer to pull me over, as a year ago when I was cycling from Miami to New Orleans, I was stopped twice in four days in Georgia.  I had been in the state this time nearly two weeks before being checked out.

Thankfully the officer wasn’t as surly as a cashier in a Circle K service station later in the day.  She kept me waiting for a couple minutes at the counter to pay for my 79 cent  fountain drink as she tidied up a stand nearby.  Then she charged me 89 cents for it though a sign clearly stated it was 79 cents.  She refused to relent, nor would she leave the counter to see the display labeling the prices for the cups, saying it was only ten cents difference.  I had already drunk enough of it while she kept me waiting to be satisfied, so I left the rest of the drink on the counter and walked out.  

When I returned to my bike a young man approached me and asked if I’d like his Big Mac.  He was sipping a soda and said he realized he didn’t really want the hamburger.  He was a husky guy who could stand to lose a few pounds, so he may have been like the woman who earlier in the trip gave me a bag of cookies that she felt guilty about buying.

The ride from Athens to Lavonia was as fine as any in the state on a lightly traveled road through forested terrain.  It was a welcome contrast to the bustling, mind-numbing traffic in the sprawl of Atlanta that took half a day to escape the day before.  It was all recent development with one mini-mall after another with the seemingly infinite franchise iterations from Waffle Houses and O’Reilly Auto Parts that are a blight on the land.  The Atlanta economy is certainly thriving, especially compared to destitute rural Georgia.

The ride was also enhanced by an overcast sky, blunting the sun.  The temperature was still near ninety, but not as draining as it would have been with the sun beating on me.  Early in the trip when the temperatures were cooler, I was averaging over eighty miles a day.  When it turned ovenish, that fell by ten miles and more.  I didn’t want to stop riding even when I surpassed eighty miles for the first time in a while.  Early in the trip Strava congratulated me for having personal bests since I joined this world-wide club of cyclists sharing the data from their rides.  The first was a 94-mile day and then a 98-mile day a couple days later. That was encouraging me for my next Strava personal best, but haven’t even come close since that first week.  Hopefully that will come soon as I head north and the terrain flattens.