Atlanta, GA -- Cigar Smoke and High Culture

We...ummm....left the camera in South Carolina.  So, we probably won't have pictures again until Colorado.  Sorry about that.  :)  Who needs cameras to remember everything anyway?  This was God trying to remind us not to be too reliant on technology to store our memories... after all, He gave us memories too, didn't he?

From South Carolina we headed further south into the land of peaches and pines--Georgia.  After driving through a whole lot of nothing but beautiful, we came across the outskirts of the city.  It's a city that I never thought about growing up.  When a Californian thinks of cities outside of California, southern cities rarely register.  But Atlanta is a pretty sweet city by the looks of it.  To judge by the people, it is an awesome place.  For the second time on this trip (the first being New York), we were meeting people who had never really met us before.  They were the family of a close friend of Keaton and I.  They treated us like family.  The Duddlestons, Heidi Schuermann's aunt and uncle, hosted us, most of Heidi's immediate family, Heidi's grandparents, and sundry other friends from church in a sumptuous southern feast!  I had collared greens for the first time (not bad, especially good with vinegar).  We learned a good deal about the South.  Heidi's family has roots there that go way back.  They knew the South like it was the backyard in which they were raised; mostly Mississippi and Louisiana, but they were getting to know Georgia and Alabama pretty good too.  

We sang for them--I think they enjoyed it almost as much as we enjoyed the food-- and then we just had a good time out on the back porch, smoking cigars, drinking and exchanging stories about road-trips past and present.  The company was delightful and the only time you can be outside in the South in the summer is after the sun has set!  The mosquitoes began to eat us alive, but I have begun to accept them as a fact of Southern living, kind of like kudzu.  I also began to realize the beauty of a slightly slower paced style of living.  It makes you really think about what it is you're doing and you often get a lot more out of it.  They enjoy their food, their conversation, their cigars, at a slower pace than I was used to... but at a pace that really made you sit back and enjoy the lazy heat of summer.  Lazy is an active adjective there, not a passive one.  The heat here makes you lazy, regardless of your work ethic...you HAVE to slow down in this sun and humidity.  I guess I should say it makes you more leisurely.  And for many (like Josef Peiper) leisure is the basis of culture...not work.  So, the South has figured out this culture thing and revels in it.  It's fun to join them.  We said goodbye to the Duddleston's the next morning after we went to church and headed on further South into the heart of the Bayou.  After a wonderful evening with them, we felt like we'd learned enough about the lore and layout of the South to experience the Bayou at its best.