Road Warriorettes Archives

June 1, 2014

Albany Art Park

All of my Road Warriorettes – Jan, Shari, Anne and Curator Jessica – have different sleep patterns than I do. I’m up until the wee hours of the morning doing blog posts after driving all day. They’re snug in their beds snoring the night away, then they get up early and traipse down to the motel’s free breakfast. I sleep until 9:32, check my email and get rolling just before check-out time. Actually, Shari was the strangest of the batch: she doesn’t come to life until she fills her tank with Starbucks coffee. I’d set the GPS for the nearest Starbucks and leave her a set of keys, hoping she wouldn’t leave me stranded in some backwater town.

Because Anne and Jessica had the early breakfast this morning, they weren’t overly hungry. My hunger alarm was clanging loudly by the time we got to the first town of any size, Albany, Georgia. We had set a goal of avoiding chain joints and had been doing well so far. The first candidate looked a little tea roomy for my taste, so Curator Jessica was dispatched to see if it had tablecloths and/or candles.

I don’t remember if she said it had hanging ferns or not, but we elected to drive around the block to see what else was downtown. When we made the turn, the Albany Artpark on Pine jumped out at us.

At first glance, it was hard to tell if the front windows were painted, if we were looking at reflections or if the colorful images were inside. I put my hunger alarm on snooze.

Fascinating urban art

What we discovered was one of the most innovative uses of an old building I had ever seen. A local organization bought a neglected building, razed the upper floor to make it open to the sky, and beefed up the exterior walls. It became a huge open-air art gallery.

There was such a 3-dimensional feeling to the graffiti art and the surrounding walls that it was hard to tell what was art and what was reality.

We were a day early

The stuff we saw was, for the most part, the equivalent of finger exercises. A formal paint-off was held the day after we were there. News accounts I saw online showed some remarkable work. It’s sort of like the annual chalk street paintings held in Lake Worth, Florida.

Opportunities for other towns

Every place I’ve lived has more than its share of decaying buildings in its downtown areas. I’d love to see art parks like this pop up all over. It’s a great outlet for artists, and the images are fun to look at.

While we were walking around, we visited Ray Charles Plaza, the subject of yesterday’s blog post. We found a great local restaurant on the way of town. It had great food at a reasonable price, served without table cloths, candles or hanging ferns.

Art Park photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.

May 30, 2014

Ray Charles Plaza

While we were meandering on back roads to get home to Florida from home in Missouri, one of the Road Warriorettes – I think it was Curator Jessica – spotted a guy playing a piano next to the Flint River in Albany, Georgia. That was worth a U-turn.

Ray Charles is a native son of Albany

Here’s a description of the park and sculpture from a city website:

Albany Georgia, birthplace of Ray Charles, has memorialized the city’s most famous native son with a downtown park that bears his name, airs his music, and features a one-of-a-kind sculpture that is one of only two sculptures in the world that bear the likeness of the legendary blues and jazz singer.

Sculpture plays music

Located in Downtown Albany on Front Street between Oglethorpe Blvd. and Broad Avenue, directly accross the street from Hilton Garden Inn, Ray Charles Plaza, designed by landscape architectural firm Jordan, Jones and Goulding of Norcross Georgia, sits on the bank of the Flint River and gives Riverfront Park visitors the experience of a Ray Charles performance. A revolving, illuminated, bronze statue of Ray Charles seated at a baby grand piano, the work of sculptor Andy Davis, is the park’s centerpiece.

Miniature displayed in visitor center

As water flows down the sides of the statue, music by the legendary blues singer plays on the park’s loudspeakers. Students from Georgia Academy for the Blind assisted Mr. Davis with the design. The students and Mr. Davis also designed a touchable miniature version of the statue that features markings in braille.

The statue is flanked by two walkways designed as keyboards with raised sharps and flats that form benches. The walkways connect to the Albany Riverwalk. The park’s “scenery” includes a large treble clef in the plaza floor and “moonlight in the pines” from the song, Georgia On My Mind. Reflecting Georgia’s longleaf pine forests, the “Moonlight in the Pines” scenery consists of illuminated loblollies, longleaf pines, live oaks and grasses.

Downtown has another attraction that I’ll save for another day.

A Hocking Block

You KNOW you are traveling with a museum curator when she starts jumping up and down all excited at spotting a Hocking block in a walkway in Albany, Georgia. The block came from a brickyard in SE Ohio, not far from where the Athens County Historical Society and Museum is located.

May 17, 2014

Contrail Brings Challenger Chills

The Road Warriorettes and I had a great day touring Florida. I’ll be sharing some of those stories and some neat things we discovered in Georgia in the future. Getting along toward sunset, I said we should take a look for gators at Nubbins Slough on the northeast corner of Lake Okeechobee.

When we got to the top of the dike, we met a pickup truck parked looking east, but didn’t think anything of it. Curator Jessica got out to shoot the clouds turning orange on the north side of the lake. When I went to swing the van around to get it out of the road, I froze.

Flashback to January 28, 1986

In the rearview mirror, I saw a contrail that brought back that cold morning on January 28, 1986, when I climbed on the roof at The Palm Beach Post to see the corkscrewing smoke left over from the Challenger explosion.

I called Wife Lila in West Palm Beach to ask if she knew if there had been a rocket launch at The Cape. She said one was supposed to have gone off at 8:03, but she didn’t know if it had any problems.

My photo was taken at 8:07, assuming the time programmed into my camera was correct.

It wasn’t until I got home that I read that a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket carrying a $245 million Global Positioning System satellite was launched into space Friday after a 24-hour weather delay.

Shortly after I turned my attention away from the rocket trail, the sky came alive.

Warriorettes are leaving me

Anne Rodgers, Texan, former newspaper colleague and bike riding partner, is moving back home to Texas early in June. Curator Jessica Cyders, from the Athens Historical Society and Museum, will be heading back to Athens, Ohio, next week to her husband and cat. She hopes that neither has starved to death in her absence.

I hope the pictures they shot at Nubbins Slough this afternoon will bring back fond memories of our meandering.

Y0u can click on the photos to make them larger.

May 16, 2014

Warriorettes Hit Florida

I got Road Warriorettes Anne and Curator Jessica over the Florida line without too much difficulty. I’m tired enough, though, that I told ’em the best gift would be for us to check into a joint without a WiFi connection so I’d have an excuse for not filing

Anne suggested we name this the No Bad Food Tour, because we haven’t had a single bad meal. Part of that is from stopping at places I’ve discovered over the years, and part is from our rule of thumb: stop only at locally-owned restaurants that have a bunch of cars in front of them.

Cypress Inn Restaurant

It’s been at least 20 or 25 ars since I ate at the Cypress Inn Restaurant in Cross City. I don’t remember if I was covering a flood or a hurricane or if it was on a vacation trip with the family.

I had the seafood platter that was every bit as good as the shrimp and oyster combo I had at a fish camp in Gastonia yesterday. The oysters weren’t quite as big, but everything on the plate was tasteful. Anne had a ribeye that was tender and had good flavor. Jessica was craving a big, greasy burger, and got her wish fulfilled.

It won’t be another 25 years before I go back. This moves up to a prime spot on my list.

We’re going to try to get into West Palm Beach early enough for Anne to wrap loose ends before she leaves Florida for her home state of Texas. Gonna miss her.