And the Photos Keep Coming

I feel like I've been posting an awful lot of slide shows lately, but they're easy and make telling the story of a trip much easier than just using words. That's an odd thing to come from a guy who likes to think of himself as a writer, I know, but I also think of myself as lazy, so deal with it.


This is the SAM Shortline train at the depot in Plains, GA. If you're curious what the big deal about Plains is, read the sign on the side of the depot. If you can't read it or are too lazy to click the image for the bigger image, the depot was Jimmy Carter's campaign depot. Otherwise, I doubt anyone would ever go to Plains on purpose, much less route a tourist train there. The town is minuscule and run down like every other small Southern rural town. Carter still lives here, although we didn't see his house. Looking at pictures and my dad's telling, it's a rather unassuming house, which really doesn't surprise me about the 39th president.


Billy Carter was Jimmy's black sheep brother who died of pancreatic cancer back in the 80s. Oddly, Billy died of the same condition that felled his father and siblings. The building has been restored on the outside and the inside has been turned from service station into one-room museum. The restrooms are clean though. The rumor of growling crotch crickets is entirely false.


This is the view when you hang out of the door between cars on the train heading back to Georgia Veteran's State Park. This is the section of the track that crosses Lake Blackshear. On the far bank is a very small section of the largest pecan grove in the United States. The grove stretched on both sides of the track for miles on that side of the lake. It totaled over 2,000 acres. That's a lot of drupes.

After the train ride, we drove over to Andersonville to sate my dorky side. This is a view of the gate in the reconstructed portion of the old stockade.

This is what the watchtowers looked like. There are actually some photos from when the prison was in use and this really is how it looked.

There are pairs of markers like this all around the site of the prison to show you where the stockade had stood and where the deadline (as in cross this line and they shoot you) was. Considering there were no actual structures inside the prison more permanent than tents, this was a huge prison.

This is the shrine that is set over Providence Spring, a spring that supposedly erupted from the ground after a lightning strike. The shrine was erected in the early 1900s.

This is a really cool installation behind the Prisoner of War Museum. The installation is intended to show the importance of water to the prisoners in Andersonville. There was only a single stream that ran through the prison and that was their only source of water. However, it came in already dirty from the Confederate soldiers camp upstream and the area basically just turned into a bog from the heavy traffic to and from the stream. It was raining when I took this picture and water streamed between the fingers of the cupped hands of the figure strengthening the image.

A different angle that shows the artificial stream that is part of the installation.

Gravestones so close together that you can tell the Union soldiers who died here were probably more or less just tossed into trenches side by side. Burials still take place here for more recent veterans. There was actually a burial earlier during the day we visited, although their headstones are spaced much farther apart.
Playing disk golf at Georgia Veteran's State Park. This is actually a really cool place as state parks go, but I suck at disk golf. Luckily no one was really that much better than me.