I was making great progress heading back to Florida from Cape. The weather was great, traffic was light to moderate, everybody was pretty well-behaved.
Well, there was a bit of a delay at Monteagle Pass, but we’ll go into that another day. I’ve got a couple of different routes I take; this time I opted to go through Atlanta on 1-75. I’ve been lucky the last few times, blasting through the area in about 30 minutes with only a few taps on the brakes.
Coming into town just about dusk, I thought I was gong to catch a break again. See how nicely the traffic is spaced out?
Look at all the taillights
Alas, around the corner was a forest of red taillights as far as you could see. It took 1-1/2 hours to do what I have been doing in 30 minutes. The skies were clear. There were no wrecks. It was just like everybody confused and thought the Interstate was one big parking lot and they needed to practice for Black Friday.
General Sherman had the right idea
I’ve always been convinced that General Sherman had the right idea of what to do with Atlanta.
[Wife Lila, who always exhibits better taste than I do, objected to my General Sherman suggestion, pointing out the death and destruction he meted out on horrific March to the Sea. Atlanta, to me, has been the source of major traffic jams, is the home of the Atlanta Braves and was where our corporate HQ was located. None of those things endear the city to me. Maybe we could just build bypasses that bypass the bypasses that exist around the city and leave General Sherman to his rest.]
Sunday morning about 7:00/8:00 is the best time to hit it. We usually zip right through. Bad thing is you have to get up and leave early to make it at that time.
The only way I’d hit Atlanta at 7 in the morning would be if I had been driving all night. If the sun ain’t up, you’re not going to find ME up.
I sent you an email. That’s a project I had planned when I escaped my Missouri years and started in on Ohio. Still, we should talk.
Just get off the freeway, take the downtown exit and go to Pittypat’s Porch or any of 100 great restaurants downtown and wait it out! Not cheap but more fun than waiting on the “Parking Lot”.
Hey! One word for you “I-75 bypass!”….solves most of these problems…
I found that going straight through the city both in Atlanta and Macon was faster than the bypasses on previous trips. The next bypass I take will go through Birmingham, Montgomery and Dothan. That should be far enough away to avoid the Atlanta mess.
Just a line or two to defend Gen. Sherman, who often get a very bad rap. He did say he was to “make GA howl”, and he did. Sherman in fact had lived in the south for many years and liked the south and its people. In April 1865 he accepted the surrender of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston and gave the rebels very generous terms. So generous that the US Government was outraged, as was President Johnson.
A good book is “April 1865, The Month that Saved America”..
I agree with Sherman and KS, that “War is Hell”, and so is driving in Atlanta…
What General Sherman did shortened the war, which was a good thing.
For pure undiluted schadenfreude, here’s a link to a marker in Atlanta that was installed by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Please note that “siege” is misspelled not once, but twice, and in nearly a century no one has caught or corrected the error. It seems fitting, somehow.
http://www.lat34north.com/historicmarkers/LargePhoto.cfm?keyId=060-D1&PicSuffix=&MarkerTitle=The%20Siege%20of%20Atlanta