Ocmulgee National Monument

This time it was a trip purely for myself. I could lie and say I stuck a pin in the map and decided randomly to go to Macon Georgia but it wasn't so. I had to see people in Macon quite early on Friday morning. Rachel came along for company. The trip up was quite peaceful and there was hardly any traffic. I passed some very interesting things beside the road though. I should have pulled over and taken a photo but I wanted to get to my hotel before dark. As it was, I arrived just as it was beginning to go dark.

The journey wasn't entirely uneventful. I'd set my in-car GPS to navigate me to the center of Macon. I'd forgotten about that until I ended up in an area where all the shops had bars over the windows and heavy-set fellows with their knuckles dragging on the ground leered ominously out of the shadows. Then, realising my error, I started using my phone to navigate me to my ultimate destination. I'd used the in-car GPS because I wanted the phone free for calls etc. As it was, for a good 50 miles outside Macon there was no T-Mobile reception and only very patchy Sprint reception.

I'd been on hotels.com and looked at all the hotels within 5 miles of my destination and had decided upon the Ramada as being the best of the budget range. Had I known more about the area. In fact had I cruised through the area using Google streetview then I would have noticed that the cheapest hotel was in the same street almost next door. I missed out on bargain budget accommodation there. The area seemed quite decent. The reviews of the hotel were appalling but regular readers will realise just how little store I put in online reviews. They're usually way off the mark. 

 As usual, Rachel commandeered the whole bed and I was left to sleep in the armchair. This is something that I have experienced before on many occasions but Rachel and I are often inseparable.

Before we retired for the night though, we did partake of evening refreshments at the upper class establishment known to all as Waffle House. After having driven some 220 miles to get to the hotel, it was very welcome that the Waffle House was right next door. As can be seen, there were a lot of hotels in that street. I could have chosen any one of them.

In daylight, the scene looks like this - taken from the hotel balcony.

To get to the hotel breakfast I had to pass through the hotel foyer. I must say I really enjoyed my stay as did Rachel and can thoroughly recommend staying there. In the foyer was a scene that looked straight out of a Dickens novel. Armchairs, books and a roaring fireplace.

This hotel had really gone to town on making its guests comfortable. From the ironing board and iron in the room to the coffee maker, microwave and fridge. It really was home away from home.

We made coffee but I can't say that I was thrilled by filter coffee from a pre-sealed container. It just didn't taste that great. My best guess is that people hardly ever brew the coffee in their hotel rooms and that the packet was a little elderly though I didn't check the expiry date on it.

The hotel breakfast was of the buffet variety. It wasn't bad either. It was very Deep South with minuscule burgers, white gravy and biscuits. Very high on fats, starches and meat but very low on vitamins or anything healthy. I set to and demolished a small mountain of food, washing it down with orange juice that came from a machine and probably had never ever encountered an orange tree. Rachel nibbled away quietly at breakfast too as tales unfolded on the television news about revolution in Ukraine and somebody video recording a protest inside the Supreme Court. The people on television were all very hyped about it all. None seemed to realise that it's so easy to disguise a video camera as something else.

On with the day we went and I went on with my morning affairs before Rachel and I met again. On the way up we'd seen all kinds of interesting things - abandoned buildings, abandoned gas stations and several national parks. I set my phone to find the nearest national park and up came the Ocmulgee National Monument. Google navigated us but on the way there was a very interesting building just crying out to be photographed.

Whatever that was clearly served a now dismantled railway. We took a few photos and moved onward letting Google on my phone navigate us to our destination. After navigating us past some abandoned buildings and derelict industrial units, Google announced that we had arrived at our destination.

There was just one problem. This didn't look like any national park I've ever seen. It looked more like a mud track in the middle of nowhere. We drove around for a while up and down various little roads before deciding that Google couldn't find its way out of a paper bag in this instance. 

Discouraged by Google's failure to find the national park we decided to head out of Macon and to visit one of the parks we spotted on the way. Lo and behold, not 20 minutes driving after we gave up on our quest to find the monument, I saw a sign mentioning it and followed it. Then another sign appeared and soon we were at the Ocmulgee National Monument.

The biggest feature of the national monument was a great big pile of dirt. The Park Ranger we spoke with knew of the Google navigation problem but complained that there was nobody to contact to fix the issue. On an aside, I generally find that bad information often gets left online forever and never corrected making it that much harder to find the good stuff. 

Apparently this mound of dirt is 17,000 years old and was built by the first inhabitants of the area who crossed the land bridge from Siberia and eventually worked their way down through South America, according to the Park Ranger. There were interesting displays of pottery inside the Ranger station. The entrance to the mound was very narrow and low. So much of the reconstruction is suppositional that I wonder how accurate it really is.

Inside the tunnel was musty and mildewy. I would be very surprised if the original inhabitants would have left their home like that. I would also have imagined there would have been some ventilation about which we currently know nothing. 

Once through the tunnel there was a viewing area where the interior of the mound could be seen. Google has very nicely stitched several of my images together to make this and has done a very nice job.

According to the display inside the ranger station, the inside of the mound would have originally been something like this:

Clearly a lot of imagination has gone into this and it would be wonderful to step back in time to watch our ancestors at work. I suspect that this may be way off the truth of how things actually happened.

One of the things that was at the display was a 60lb bag of soil which people were invited to try to lift and the suggestion that the people of old were superhuman and managed to carry hundreds of these bags every day. Certainly they probably were more muscular than we are today. I know when I came from Britain to the US, I amazed people with my stamina because I was so used to walking. I imagine it will be the same thing for carrying 60lbs of soil. To be honest, I have carried 72lb boxes of books before now. I don't really think our ancestors were at all superhuman.

 Inside the center were displays of pottery attributed to the Ocmulgee. There was a whole time theme devoted to them as apparently that site had been occupied for thousands of years.

There was a display of the founders of the modern America with the Ocmulgee but quite frankly by this time we'd pretty much had enough of theorised displays and simulated scenes that might or might not have occurred. Walking around the site looking at the physical evidence was much more interesting. Coming to our own conclusions rather than being spoon fed somebody else's theorising.

We wandered around looking at various mounds. Today was definitely a day with a lot of walking and exercise. I lost count of the sets of stairs we climbed. Without a shadow of a doubt the Ocmulgee national dirt pile is the best keep-fit gym that exists.

From the top of this mound, we saw a wide panorama with Macon in the background. If I'd realised Google would auto-stitch images I'd have done a wider panorama.

In the distance were more mounds but by that time we'd had enough climbing and mountaineering for the day. We headed back toward the Ranger Station as that's where we'd parked.

On the way we spotted a water fountain and wished to quench our thirst for it was a warm day to be walking, even in February. Sadly the fountain was out of water.

 One of the interesting things is that some vandal in the 1880s had cut a railway line right through one of the mounds and very close to another so there is actually a busy railway line that runs through the park.

It was crossed by a simple footbridge which had barriers up high on each side. I guess that America has problems like Britain does with imbeciles throwing things off bridges onto trains.

Oddly enough, this was not the last train we saw. Huddled away devoid of a purpose and rusting shamefully, one of the old stalwarts that built the Wild West stood forlorn in downtown Macon.

One can only assume that the boiler is in such poor shape that it had to be covered by a tarpaulin to stop the rust from blowing away in the wind.

Macon is like most typical American cities - it has its glitzy new places but an awful lot of abandoned places.

It seems a crying shame to have buildings like that left idle when they could be used to house the homeless.

As by now we were clearly not in a good neighborhood, we made haste to leave and bade Macon and the Ocmulgee National Monument farewell for this trip. Who knows - we may return.