Roughly a four hour drive from Savannah to Athens. We went through a couple of towns before and after Greensboro (where there is a Walmart), and man, were they ever decimated. Ironically we saw a couple of Walmart trucks heading in to offload their wares in a nearby town.Hey: I get it. If you don't have a lot of money: Walmart is super cheap and times are tough right now (and getting increasingly more so).
But isn't it so cool how they donate so much money to influence the politics of America? I'm not so jaded or stupid to think that money doesn't influence politics in Canada, but it's nowhere near what's going on with the lobbyists in the US.
We went by an anti-Monsanto rally in Savannah and I was super stoked, but like a coworker said to me years ago: it doesn't matter. The lobbyists have the money to influence governmental decisions, and the "Greens" don't have any cash, therefore no say. I love the US, and I have had nothing but positive experiences in my travels to the numerous (yes: mostly liberal) cities I've visited, but I am very glad that lobbyists are kept to a minimum in Canada.
So we set out from Savannah around 11am today and we took a quieter route (the 15) and we were totally amazed by the number of churches we drove by. Seriously: there had to be one church for every hundred people along the way. It was nuts. Maybe it was a certain segment that we traversed through? We were glad to get out of it.Anyways, the Graduate in Athens is a really cool place to crash and the guy at the desk guided us in all the right directions. We ended up at the Globe, listening to some rather great Celtic music.
Weird fact about the US: they still don't seem to have chip cards yet; and a lot of good places don't utilize social media as much as they should. Case in point: I'd like to link the Globe, but I got nothin'.
So Athens. Uni town. Cool downtown core, neat Uni campus and the largest stadium I have ever seen (yay US college football!). People are friendly, it's a nice space. The Graduate is a funky place, and basically I don't want to have to come home and work for a living.
Yay!
Ahhh the Deep South, churches on every corner, grits, greens, and fucking WalMart. You know that some places in the DS still don't have indoor plumbing. I am stoked about the antiMonsanto rally too, I'm totally shocked.
ReplyDeleteYep. One of the towns we drove through was Sparta. I think there was a gas station, an H&R Block and maybe one other thing open there: it was truly sad.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways it's sad, but in others it's sort of nice. Some people wouldn't want to live any other way. I have family that choose to live in towns with less than 150-200 people. I would if I could.
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