A short post here for a short two-day stop in Savannah. For many years now I’ve heard of what a beautiful city Savannah was and I’ve wanted to see for myself. As we plotted out our Duluth to Key West road trip, we figured this would be the one new city that we’d go to just to see it, no friends to visit or anything.

It was totally worth it. People weren’t lying; Savannah is an incredibly beautiful city, evoking all the charming and iconic visions of the Old South. Of course the Old South wasn’t quite so charming for all the people who lived here; one is reminded that Savannah was Gen. Sherman’s goal in his “March to the Sea” across Georgia in 1864. To our good fortune, and presumably theirs, the city surrendered to the Union forces before they had the chance to destroy it.

Sadly I didn’t get to enjoy or discover the city as much as I would have liked. On our last day in Atlanta I somehow developed a truly nasty blister on one of my feet and really just couldn’t walk for a couple of days. Still, I somehow managed to limp around a bit to enjoy the grand old buildings, the live oak trees (the name “live oak” refers to oaks that are evergreens, keeping their leaves year-round) with hanging Spanish moss, and at least a couple of the 22 squares in the historic district that give the city so much of its charm.

One of those squares, Chippewa Square, deserves special mention. I was pretty excited to just stumble on Chippewa Square, since my family is Chippewa. What the heck is this park doing honoring my very northern Plains tribe? Turns out it wasn’t. Instead it was a misspelled park honoring the soldiers from the War of 1812 who fought in the Battle of Chippawa in Chippawa, Ontario, today a part of the Canadian city of Niagara Falls. Too bad. One other charming story about Chippewa Square: it’s the spot where Forrest Gump famously sat on a park bench. How cool is that?

Oh, and speaking of charm, I loved being in a restaurant and hearing people order beer to go. Seriously. Us northerners take so much pride in being so much more progressive than those damned southerners. Go ahead and try to order beer to go in any of the great progressive cities I’ve lived in up north. Hell, until just a few years ago there were no sidewalk restaurants in Cambridge because the city wouldn’t allow beer or wine to be served in sidewalk restaurants.

Two days wasn’t enough for Savannah, particularly given how lame I was during those two days, but that was all the time we gave ourselves. Now it was off on another whirlwind schlep through Florida down to Miami Beach, thought of by some of us as the Holy Land.

Atlanta in April – and it feels like summer already!

We had two friends to see and three days to do it in. Officially Mark had never been in Georgia before – connecting through the airport doesn’t count – so we figured it was worth three days. And indeed it was even though one of our friends ultimately was sidelined with back trouble so we couldn’t see him (getting old sucks). The three days with our friend Susan Shaer, though, was fantastic.

We were close friends with Susan back in Massachusetts, but not long after we left to start our world adventure she sold her house in Arlington to buy smaller places in Denver and Atlanta where her daughters, and perhaps more importantly her grand-children, live. And after these exciting years we had a lot of catching up to do.

Lunches, dinners, drinks – we did it all. Susan is a fascinating woman who had an impressive career working in politics and non-profits. She ultimately survived two unfortunate marriages and these days is thriving on her own spending winters in Atlanta near one daughter and summers in Denver near the other.

Lots to catch up on. But even with all that time with Susan we had a lot of time on our own to explore at least pieces of Atlanta. First, the mistake. Mark spends a lot of time researching where we should stay and based on that research chose a nice Starwood property in the Buckhead neighborhood. A place you’re supposed to be able to walk around and all that. Hah! You can walk as long as you like walking along broad, busy, noisy thoroughfares. And everything that you want to see is miles away. I actually did a bunch of those five- and six-mile walks to get to various places and back … and ended up paying the price when I got a really nasty blister on the last day. Word to the wise: stay in Midtown, not Buckhead!!

Now, what was there to see in Atlanta? Besides some really good restaurants, we enjoyed the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

The King Center was good, and we were there just days before the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. I always cry when I see a tape of that last speech in Memphis the night before he was killed. You know the one:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

You worry that fifty years later in a land where white nationalists are equated with people protesting racism, the promised land maybe ain’t what was promised.

And then we went to the Carter Library. In some ways for me that was even a bigger deal. That was the first presidency that I experienced as an adult, and of course the great Walter Mondale played a big role in it.

There were two exhibits in particular that I found striking. One was a 10-minute video of a “day in the life” of the president, showing the many meetings, discussions, memos, and calls Carter dealt with on just one ordinary day; truly an impressive array of issues to deal with. The other was a detailed review of the Camp David accords, 13 days of intense meetings with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin that were deep, deep in the details of that historic conflict but that led to the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that has held to this day.

What was so striking in particular about these exhibits was the juxtaposition of Carter – trained as a nuclear physicist – handling these difficult issues in extraordinary detail and sensitivity, compared to the current piece of shit in the White House. Utterly inconceivable that Trump would ever have intelligent discussions about the minutiae of transportation policy and energy policy and education policy, or could break away from Fox News to spend 13 days hashing out a successful peace treaty in the Middle East. I always thought Jimmy Carter was a good man, but I also recognize that he had distinct shortcomings as a president. Compared the current incumbent, though, he was a giant.

Enough ranting about politics; I usually prefer to save that for pre-dinner drinks with Mark.

Atlanta, though, was good. We have quickly leapt from winter in Duluth through spring in early summer here, where the daytime temperature on Easter Sunday was in the low 80s. From here it’s east to Savannah and then south into Florida. Lots of driving but it’s been a great way to visit with old friends.

From Chicago our next stop was Louisville, KT, in a mad dash to escape winter. It was a five-hour drive mostly through Indian and I hated it. It wasn’t because Indiana is pretty boring, though it is, or even just that five hours is too long to be in a car. It was the tolls.

I hate, hate, hate toll booths. If you’re a local and have a transponder to just drive through they’re bad enough but with that they are dangerous (lots of accidents as cars slow down at varying tempos), environmentally unsound (as cars slow and stop, idling, waiting their turn), time-consuming, and just all-around annoying. On top of that there is the whole “screw tourist” thing where in many cases they’ve done away with staffed toll booths and just bill the owner of the car. When the car rental agency gets the bill they pass it on to the renter – along with a $25 fee or something like that. Outrageous. So far we’ve only encountered that once and have been going through hell trying to get the Indiana department in charge of screwing tourists to let us pay it over the phone or online before they bill the rental company.

Where are the state Attorneys General in their role protecting consumers? Or state tourist industries convincing the Attorneys General to take it on? And while I’m on the subject, why don’t these people insist that rental companies allow a second driver at no additional cost. It’s inconceivable to me that there is any measurable cost to Hertz if Mark & I are both drivers and there must be a significant safety issue in ensuring that, if possible, there are two drivers for longer trips.

Now, Louisville. We finally got there in time for lunch with our old friend Sue Dixon and her husband Jim. Great fun catching up and, for me, meeting Jim. Sue & Jim have both spent their careers in politics (I know; hard to believe that Mark & I have political friends) back in the day when Democrats could win races in Kentucky. After the 2014 bloodbath, when Kentucky’s Trump-before-Trump-was-Trump Republican won, they’ve both stepped away from it so we needed to see how their new lives are going. All in all not so bad: more time for bonding with six-year-old Emily, a new business for Jim, and a well-deserved break from politics. I mean, who are Mark & I to complain about someone for stepping away from it all, right?

And there was a little time for exploring of Louisville, a city that seems to be starting to come back from some years of hard times. The downtown stretch where we were staying had some attractive buildings that had been restored and we saw some of that in progress as a couple of buildings had been entirely razed except for the facade. Good job! A look at the 2nd Street bridge from which Cassius Clay says he threw his Olympic gold medal when he returned to Louisville and discovered that gold medal or not, he was still just another … umm, you know the N word … in his home town. That plus an attempt at a bourbon tour that worked pretty well. When we got there they were sold out for the day but in cases like that you can just go up to the second floor and have a free tasting of three different local bourbons. In other words we didn’t pay for the tour but got the part that we were most interested in. Not a bad deal.

Then it was a fun dinner with Sue – Jim stayed home with six-year-old Emily while Sue proved just as fun and funny and smart as we remembered from all those years ago – and off the next morning to Lexington.

Lexington is less than two hours from Louisville and it was a surprisingly beautiful drive. Much of it was on the Bluegrass Parkway which was just a really pleasant drive (with no tolls…). It was finally becoming slightly springish with great rolling green hills. Real horse country.

Once we got into Lexington we were truly charmed. We were stopping her to see Ben Self, an old friend from politics. He was the Chief Technology Officer at the DNC back when they decided to hire us to make the VAN available to Democrats nation-wide, so we’ve always had a very soft spot in our heart for him. That plus the fact that he’s just a great guy all around.

Like a lot of people, though, he got burned out on DC politics and went back home to Lexington. What to do with the second stage of your adult life? How about open a local brewery? Sure enough, Ben has reinvented himself as Kentucky’s premier microbrewery. He describes the business as having a triple bottom line: to be a great employer, to be environmentally sensitive, and to be a great part of the community. He seems to have succeeded in all, while simultaneously running a (very) successful business. Oh, and in his spare time he’s returned to politics, serving these days as the Kentucky state Democratic Party chair. That’s a big deal.

On top of great fun just reconnecting with Ben and seeing this new life of his, we happened to be in Lexington for the major celebration of his sixth anniversary with the brewery. He invited seven of Lexington’s top chefs to come and serve small plate dishes paired with various of his beers. It was brilliant! Fortunately Mark & I had decided to just ignore our low-carb diet this one night and it was completely, totally worth it. Great food, great beer, and some fun people. We met a couple of Ben’s employees and to say they were enthusiastic about their jobs couldn’t be more of an understatement.

I can’t say enough about how impressed we were with his operation there. Almost enough to make me start drinking beer again. And on top of all that Ben’s wife Rebecca (whom we first met when we ran into them completely unexpectedly in the immigration line entering St. Lucia in 2008!) runs an impressive non-profit in the same building as Ben’s brewery demonstrating how old urban buildings can be used to grow food and teaching kids about all that. Crazy impressive.

Oh, and on the subject of Lexington, even without Ben and the brewery and just accidentally being there on the best night of the year, the city itself seemed really cool – great buildings, pleasant parks, friendly people. I thought we were just going to have a little visit with an old friend but it turns out I liked the city, too.

The next morning then it was off to Nashville, our third stop in three days. We were supposed to visit more old political friends here – a couple who met while working with Mark on Tom Harkin’s presidential campaign – but as it turned out they were both out of town so instead we had the afternoon and evening to ourselves. We took a nice afternoon walk out to the Villanova campus and on to Centennial Park, built in 1903 to celebrate Nashville’s centennial.

By now it was definitely starting to feel a bit more springy, with tulips and trees abloom. Very nice. Not only that but in Centennial Park you get to see what they claim is the world’s only full-scale replica of Athens’ Parthenon. Of course when we want to see the Parthenon we just drop by Athens to see the real thing, but the setting here in Nashville was pleasant too. In fact, after the centennial celebrations were over the city intended to tear it down but the people arose in protest so there it is still. And definitely not as hot as the summer stops we’ve made in Athens!

As for the rest of Nashville, the reason everyone else comes here? Well, I think maybe I’m just too old for that. In the evening we walked past a lot of clubs with cheap beer and really loud live music. Not exactly my idea of a good time. As Mark put it, too many 20-something Woo-Hoo!-ing. I’d thought that still we would stop into at least one and try it but they were just all too loud and too crowded so instead we found an adult place for a pleasant cocktail and then a steakhouse to make sure we were completely back on diet.

There you are, three stops in three nights. Finally done with snow and starting to find spring. Next it’s Atlanta where we have a couple friends to see and, since it’s probably the biggest city in the country that Mark hasn’t been to, we’re going to stay for three days. Enough of this driving every day!