Pat and Sari's Honeymoon Bike Ride

Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Athens, GA to Atlanta, GA
54 miles (907 total miles)

A pretty pathetic set of pictures today, I'm afraid. For the first time this trip, we were on major roads all day and the photo ops were very few. Then, about 20 miles from our destination, it started pouring and there was no further chance of taking pictures. Now that we're at our hosts' home in a lovely area of Atlanta, the rain has stopped and the sky is clearing. Tomorrow promises to be a nice day. We're spending the night at the home of another high school friend of Pat's, Louise, and her husband David.

We started this morning at about 7:30 and went in search of breakfast. A waiter at the restaurant at which we had an evening snack told us of a place about 4 miles out which was a little hard to find. We had almost given up when we finally spotted it. We went off again by about 8:30 with threatening clouds and a warm temperature. The wind was pleasantly cool and mostly behind us and a bit to our left. It was not very strong except for a few gusts now and then. Route 23 was a 4-lane divided highway with fairly heavy traffic most of the time. The shoulder was wide enough but had rumble strips every 30 feet which were annoying. Pat kept on a tight line just at the edge of the right lane while I kept a sharp eye on my rear-view mirror; we'd move over to the shoulder if the traffic seemed too heavy. The lanes were really wide enough that the cars could pass us easily, but they were moving very fast so we didn't want to take any chances. The road was hilly but the grades were pretty mild.

We got off Route 23 finally and jogged through a little town in Gwinnett County that had a very quaint little main street and some historic-looking buildings. It must have been part of Lawrenceville, we couldn't tell what town it was. Lawrenceville itself had some very nice areas, but by then the rain had started in earnest. We had put our rain jackets on in time, but our heads, legs, and feet were soaked pretty quickly. We managed to plug along, getting splashed by the traffic which was whizzing by again. We stopped only a couple of times to take a break from the noise and the drenching. We were glad to pull off onto quieter streets near our final destination. Atlanta pulled the usual trick of saving the worst hill for last - this time a 12% grade, luckily for only a few hundred feet, with a short plateau where we stopped to catch our breath, then a 10% bit for a few more feet before we could finally coast the rest of the way to Louise's house.

We had 2 answers to our muscadine/scuppernong quiz, both saying they were grapes, but David Steuber, Pat's brother, came up with a website link going into their history, recipes, and other details. Muscadine is a native American grape used mostly in jams and jellies, the Scuppernong is a variety of muscadine, named after a small town in North Carolina where they were first grown. William Routh from Greensboro, NC, who often gives us information on local issues, let us know that the low farm buildings we saw were chicken houses. P.S. we have hit another milestone of sorts - we've traveled 900 miles on the trip to date, 1/10th of our total!

We've added some pictures of our hosts and their beautiful house and garden.