At around 4:00 a.m., I heard coyotes off in the distance celebrating a kill. Being so close to the road I wasn't worried about them paying me a visit. I fell back asleep easily, which was unusual. The alarm was set for 6:30 a.m. I woke at 6:15. It was still dark and the waning moon stood fairly high in the predawn sky. The base tarp had worked very well. Only the corners of the tent floor were damp from wet leaves.
Everything got rolled up and packed away. The tarp was quite foldable. In this situation, where there is moisture on one side of the tarp, I simply fold that into the middle, not allowing it to touch the dry side. It didn't fit perfectly back into its little bag, but the part sticking out wasn't overly so.
I hit the road when traffic was sparse, getting up to my pace from the day before. By my best estimates there was about seven miles to cover before reaching Comer. I could either find a place to sleep there or travel on to Bowman...
This is what I meant by "dreary" in the last post. Drab, gray, muddy rivers, stripped-bare trees and dead leaves. It thought, as I walked along: If everything was going to die in the winter, Maine would be a preferable place to be aesthetically. At least there would be a nice snow cover and ice.
I'd only gone a couple miles when I ran into this...
This roadwork lasted in various forms of disarray for five godawful miles.
Notice I had to frequently walk on the right, which is much more dangerous.
Every now and then, I could walk along the new dirt side on the left,
but then it would turn into piles of rubble and I'd have to switch over.
It was New Year's Day morning, and traffic was mercifully light. I passed a small shrine to someone killed along this part of the road--always a reminder of how quickly the walk can end...
Seven miles is a long way. But, when I compared it to what I might be doing later that day, it didn't seem so bad. Eventually, the much anticipated green sign appeared...
Then, the red one which I'd also seen on Google Street View. Nice to see it in person...
I thought I took some pictures when I got into town, but apparently not. It was essentially a one intersection downtown area, with a Chevron station that also served as a food store and little diner...
Google Street View of Comer South Georgia.
I stopped in, and saw that most of the guys (the white guys at least) were dressed very much like I was--hunter greens, grays, and camo. For the hell of it, asked if they had Wi-fi. They did!
Unfortunately, there wasn't an AC outlet, and I'd forgotten to completely turn off the laptop - leaving it in "sleep" mode - from which it woke itself sometime during the night before and drained the battery down to 10%. But, I was able to get online long enough to see another $5 donation, which was quickly transferred to my card. It was nice to be able to buy breakfast.
The young man in the kitchen area had piles of eggs, sausage patties, hash browns, bacon, biscuits, chicken patties and gravy. Real good price: about $2.50 for one of each! I've learned to like biscuits and gravy as part of breakfast something unknown to Northern Yankees. The prices in general are very reasonable in Geogia. For some reason everyone from McDonald's to this place gave me the "senior discount" on coffee. In this case I got my coffee for $0.45. It felt good to eat a full meal. There was enough left over for another Gatorade. And I would really need it.
Checking the map, it was just over fourteen miles to Bowman from Comer, translating into about four hours. If I could make it all the way there I would be walking almost twenty two miles on this day. I headed north on Gholston Street (Route 98) for two miles and then would turn right onto 172. I saw there had been a spot back in the road construction stretch of 72 when I could have turned on the 172. But, I was glad I'd missed it. If I'd taken it, I would have never walked through Comer.
I settled in for a really long haul. My heels were aching after the first five miles, especially the left one. The left foot takes the brunt of everything. It is the one most frequently tipped down the shoulder of the road. There really is no way to relieve the pain as I'm walking. Although, I did find that the rumble strip grooves that ran along the edge of the road (there are forty, spaced about twelve inches from bump to bump, then a blank spot of about ten feet, then the next set of forty--yes, I counted them!) that were helpful when I stepped the arch of my foot onto the top of a bump--not allowing the heel to touch the ground. I used this technique quite a bit in the days that followed...
Looks like these steers are in the field.
Very large Baptist church (it's pretty much nothing but Baptist denominations down here).
I found this interesting story as I approached the Broad River Bridge...
Now I was getting into river and mountain country. The frequency and height of the hills increased proportionately. I found walking uphill much more comfortable than downhill. When going downhill, the tops of my feet would be stressed by the shoes slipping back. But uphill I had more traction and a tighter fit to the shoes...
I'm sure this is a truly beautiful place in the summer time.
Sorry about the gore. I was trying to keep track of the different kinds of animals in
the area and this was one very effective way.
I counted the hours, calculated the number of miles I'd traveled compared to how far I had to go, and did the kilometers to miles conversion over and over again, as I periodically checked my pedometer (which only records in kilometers). My average walking is speed is a very predictable 3.33 mph (about 5.14 km/h). I do a lot of math while I'm walking, just to kill time. Every fifteen of my steps is about 0.01 km's (~10 meters). I pull out receipts from my pocket and figure out sales tax percentages, predict PayPal fees, my Business Savings balance with a tiny amount of interested added, etc. Certainly, these are the most boring possible activities, but just slightly less boring than the walking itself--or, I really should call it monotonous, not boring.
And hour passed, then another two, then as the last one stretched on, with just over three miles to go before reaching Bowman, I began to really feel the distance. My back was completely wet with sweat, my hat was soaking up the sweat from my head, but allowing it to evaporate. I really needed to rest. On the Manifest Destiny Journey to California from Maine, I rested every five miles or so, but with the lighter pack as I have now, I could pretty easily do fifteen miles--twenty got a bit more difficult.
Finally, the sweet sight of a digital gas price came into view. These are really like seeing a palm tree in the desert, indicating an oasis...
I stopped into the Minit Mart and spent nearly the rest of my money on a "chunk of pizza". There was plenty of Gatorade for the night. At a nearby rotted out and semi-moss-covered picnic table, I took off Saggy and let my shirt dry as best I could. Again, for the hell of it, I pulled out the laptop and found an intermittent Xfinity signal. It lasted long enough to see some of the nearby green patches on Google Earth. There weren't many. When the signal died, and just before the laptop died, I spied with my little eye a green smudge of land about two miles further up 172. It wasn't much, but it was a lead for a sleep spot.
Bowman is a perfectly circular town (as Comen had been--but for one piece of attached land, making that town look like a Christmas ornament on the map). Having stopped in the frigid air, I began to feel a bit chilly. The shirt wasn't drying very well, and all I wanted to do was get a campsite established and then crawl into the nice warm sleeping bag.
I got the pack on my back and blew this town. The rest had helped. I saw no very appealing spots to camp for quite a way down. Then, sometimes there were good places but a house would be across from them. I did however come to an area with no houses, where the road became elevated to let a stream pass under.
I saw the occasional makeshift entrance, probably for hunting truck access. But one stuck out as a real possibility. The traffic had lightened up enough for an exploratory run across the road and into the woods. No cars had seen me.
I was wearing my Maine Moosehead t-shirt, with the IWALLK long sleeve t over it (inside out) and my new green short sleeve button down safari-like shirt over the other two. The layers made for an acceptable replacement of the fleece jacket I hadn't been able to buy yet. But, especially, they were perfect colors for blending into a forest. The black of the backpack - though nicely hidden at night - did stick out against the drab oranges, browns, and greens. A car came flying by, but the uneven terrain was a helping shield against being seen. There would be flat areas, then a steep eight foot hill to scoot down--a pattern.
Sidearm gun shots and barking dogs were heard in the southward direction, while huge shot gun blasts rumbled from deep in the eastern forest. Every now and then across the road and up the field a way, was an automatic weapon's tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat... in regular and rapid succession. And I was between them all--lovely!
With all this space of perhaps forty acres to choose from, there were hardly any truly flat spots that didn't have a lot of logs and dead sticks to remove. I was a bit shy with my excavations after that morning back in Athens waking up with the brown recluse spider in my tent. And, true to my instincts, upon looking very closely at a branch with a fine thread attached, I saw my first black widow spider. They are the easiest ones to identify--being jet black, bulbous, with thin legs, shiny-smooth, with a bright red "symbol" on the abdomen (there a various designs); in this particular case, looking a bit like a shortened Greek column. But I cannot over exaggerate just how small this spider was. It was a tiny baby, perhaps four millimeters from the tips of the front legs to the tips of the rear legs. I tried to get a picture but the macro setting refused to capture it, focusing on the background leaf litter instead. The point - for me - was that if baby is around, somewhere, so was mama. Maybe many mamas...
I had to settle for a downward inclined spot. It wasn't much of a slope, but enough to make sleeping kind of uncomfortable--slipping slowly over the night, from the head end to the foot end of the tent. I set up the tarp, the tent, then the fly. Then, before climbing in, I did one last scout of the area, finding a long ATV trail leading down to the southern gunnies. The next day would be a Saturday, and I could imagine them piling all the inbred brothers into their four-wheelers before dawn and heading out to "shoot some stuff!" So I made sure my spot was partially hidden from that clearing.
I had scraped my hands pretty badly on pricker and thorn bushes on the run from the road to the first hill, and spent some time biting out thorns and then spitting them on the ground. A few opened up capillaries and a surprising amount of blood came out for the sizes of the holes. I remembered to get a shot of the distance of my long walk...
The day's total, about 21.7 miles; a respectable distance.
Sleep spot, just north of Bowman, South Carolina.
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