Georgia, Finally

Besides the requisite 45 minute delay in Peoria, the flight to Atlanta went okay. As we landed in the fading light I was able to see the outline of lots of lakes and the deep green of what appeared to be heavily forested hills. The airport is on the edge of Atlanta, so we passed over scattered developments mixed into the forests and what seemed to be a semi-random network of roads that twisted and turned through the countryside.





The dirt, where exposed by new construction, is a light reddish-brown. I found out today that the ground is quite sandy, but tends to be severely depleted because of generations of cotton farming. Now there's miles and miles of pine forest, which is one reason Cat manufactures it's Forest Products here.





After I got off the plane, two things happened to me that have got to be some kind of a record. First, I waited for almost two hours for my suitcases to make their way from the plane to the luggage carousel. They weren't lost or anything, it just took them that long to get there. It only took us an hour and a half to fly from Peoria to Atlanta! Second, I got lost twice in one night in the rental car. I was pretty disoriented when I finally left the rental yard, having rode the shuttle bus to the lot from the airport and not really knowing which way was which despite the directions from Cat Travel and the rental company map I'd grabbed on my way out the gate. Turns out the directions were pretty worthless and the map difficult to make out in the dark while driving down the road and to make a long story short I got headed east down the freeway towards Atlanta when I should have been heading west to hook up with I85 South. After getting that squared away and checking my directions to the hotel carefully during the forty minute drive, I found myself in the middle of nowhere looking at a grove of pine trees where the Holiday Inn should have been. The directions from Cat Travel were worse than worthless, they were just plain wrong. Fortunately I had a Google road map and a vague recollection of the description that my contact here had given me about how to get to the factory from the hotel, so I backtracked a bit a found what I was looking for. All's well that ends well, I guess, but it was sure hard to get out of bed this morning.