Usually, our road trips to Michigan entail a straight shot from Tampa to Attica with a stray pit-stop here and there. We're always in a hurry to get to see family and there's always a full agenda once we get there. This time, Jayne had a few surprises up her sleeve. I should have known something was up when we didn't leave Tampa at the crack of dawn and didn't rush through Atlanta. All of the sudden, this was a leisurely trip and the stops along the way were terrific fun. Our first day, we only drove as far as Georgia and stayed over night in an Atlanta Hampton Inn. We stopped at a local mom & pop restaurant for dinner, bought Georgia lottery, and simply enjoyed not being rushed. The next day, we drove an hour to Cleveland, Georgia to a little spot called Gold n' Gem Grubin' and mined for gemstones! It was really exciting to sit and sift through buckets of dirt and find gems. We had seen a show on the Travel Channel where Becky Worley found all sorts of great gems...and so did we. We found rubies, sapphires, tiger's eye, garnet, emeralds and fool's gold, just to name a few. There were families and couples from all over sitting and chatting. One old guy kept us laughing by keeping a running commentary on what he found in his sifter. A pebble! A cigarette butt! Fool's Gold! I countered him once and said I'd found a kidney stone. That got a chuckle as well. It was a great way to spend the morning and we have bags of gemstones to polish and maybe turn into some great jewelry eventually.After grubbing for gems, we took the long and winding way around the Blue Ridge Mountains, stopped at great farm markets and made our way to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Jayne had yet another ace up her sleeve. This time, we stopped at Ruby Falls and took the underground tour to see the falls. What an awesome sight! It was worth the long walk through the underground shaft to stand under the mist and hear the roar of these magnificent falls.
Between our gemstone stop and Ruby Falls, we found ourselves in a little town called Dahlonega. It's a quaint little mountain village just at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains through which we had just spent an hour or so winding our way up and over. For about five miles, from one end of Dahlonega to the other, about every 25-feet, on both sides of the road, there were American flags planted on top of white crosses. Each cross had inscribed the name of a local fallen hero going down the cross, and the name of the war they served in going across the cross - from wars dating back as far as World War I including World War II, Korean War, the Gulf War, and Vietnam War.
Hundreds and hundreds of these flags on crosses decorated a parade route for Memorial Day. If you looked carefully, you'd also see that several streets were named after these same heroes as well. One of the main streets, Morrison Moore Parkway, was also named after a fallen soldier who has his memorial flag-cross planted near his street. The white crosses go up long before July 4th, around the week before Memorial Day, and stay up through July. Then, they emerge, again, in early November, just before Veterans' Day. We were both awestruck and proud. What a gem of a find that was, on top of all the other rubies of the day.Yet another gem awaited us at the end of the day when we stopped in Caryville, Tennessee, at a Hampton Inn tucked into the side of a mountain. This was not just any Hampton Inn. It had llamas grazing on its property (which I didn't notice until the next morning; I actually thought they were statues until they started moving)! Quaint and historic is how I would describe this museum of a hotel! The owner, Hack Ayers, was on-site when we went down to breakfast and his pride just about busted out of his chest when he talked about the history of Caryville, his family's connection to the town and the way he's maintained that history in his hotel. The walls are decorated with war photos and family photos. Framed in the hallway by the elevator, was his late father's leather jacket with a bullet hole in it; there it proudly stands as a testament Johnny Ayers' bravery. Hack owns the llamas, by the way; a little fact he told me while he was busing tables, serving tea and chatting up his customers. This is one hotel we'll certainly stay in again.
