Day 2: The Dream Continues

After a fabulous send-off by friends, and a fairly restful night in Winder, we set off around 9:30am for the second leg of our trip. We're thinking we have about 40 miles to cover today, which will put us at Hard Labor Creek State Park near Rutledge, GA. We had (cleverly, we thought) avoided the church traffic by leaving somewhat later in the morning. And to be fair, the traffic was fairly light. Those folks that were out on the roads, though, were late for church--and driving like the proverbial bats out of hell. Today's route was certainly much flatter than yesterday's, and we spent the first hour on gently rolling hills. As we got closer to creeks, we'd have long, fabulous downhills--followed by long, less-fabulous uphills. Because we're each carrying a trailer with 30-35 lbs. of gear, we can get up some speed on the downhills (and leave Tim trailing in our dust). On the uphills, though, gravity is not our friend--and Tim zips by us with enough time for a store stop before we catch up. Serves him right thast he was nearly eaten alive by fire ants while waiting for us at one corner . . . But the weather was sunny and there wass just enough of a breeze to keep us cool. The secondary roads that we traveled took us through horse country -- and a couple of them even raced with us for a while. It's really beautiful countryside -- everything is greening up and bursting into bloom. Every now and again I'd catch the scent of honeysuckle or wisteria, and when I'd see the wild blackberry bushes at the side of the road, I'd start to dream about fresh berries at the end of a days ride,