1999-11-04 I guess I haven't been doing a good job describing my route. I left Atlanta yesterday about noon. I followed highway 19 south to Zebulon, where I camped. Today I have continued to follow 19 south. My campsite tonight is someplace between Americus and Smithville. I biked over 80 miles today. And there are dogs barking. Always with the barking. I learned an important lesson today about South Georgian forests: don't go in them. Most of them appear to be fairly impenetrable anyway, but once in a while a break can be found and some gullible yankee, such as myself, will try to push his bike in and set up camp. By the time I pushed my way back out, I was bleeding from multiple wounds and wondering how there could be so many species of vine in such a small area. So I found a nice tree farm and set my tent up on pine needles. Ahhh, pine needles... About what I said about the levelness of the terrain yesterday: I was wrong. Even so, today's ride was great. I passed fields of cotton, hickory groves with fresh pecans that you could pick off the trees from the side of the road (Gotta eat them fresh; it's the only way!), and even a field of musk melons (I was tempted). I also saw the largest goat I have ever seen in my life. From Thomaston to Ellaville, highway 19 was almost void of traffic. Sometimes it would seem like I'd go 10 or 15 minutes without getting passed in either direction. Now that's biking. Some of you following my updates may remember that there has been a vicious race between dead raccoons and dead opossums since Wisconsin. Raccoons took a big lead in Illinois and Indiana, but starting with Kentucky, opossums made a strong comeback. Not that I'm counting; that would be morbid. Now there is a new contestant that, although starting late, is taking the race by storm. I wrote a song about it: Got a hit 'em now. Got a hit 'em. Going out of my way to hit ARMADILLOS. See 'em in the ditch now. In the ditch. The ditches are full of ARMADILLOS. Ar Ar Ar Ar Ar Ar Ar Ar (Wheeew) ARMADILLOS! Okay, I admit that I may not be spelling armadillo correctly. It isn't in my dictionary. I also admit that I may have already been on the road too long. So, today, in my mind, I can say I'm officially "South." I say this for three reasons: many many many ant hills, cane poles growing along side the road, and dead armadillos. There is also an abundance of insects. I stopped at a store today in Butler where a black guy questioned me about my bike. It sounded like he also owned two very nice bicycles, although it was hard for me to tell because he had to literally repeat everything he said about three times before I could understand him. I'm horrible with these dialects down here. The neat thing about this guy was that although he was definitely black, he had blue eyes. Maybe this is common, but I've never seen it before. Speaking of dialects, I can't imagine what it would be like to be biking in Europe or Africa where instead of different dialects, I would be hitting whole different languages. I don't think I'm ready for that yet.