40 mile ride to Carl

I got to go for a long bike ride again! I needed that to lift my spirits. It always has a way of doing that for me...even though I'm usually hurting when I get home. Today was especially nice because I let myself get lost. I took roads I didn't know where they led to. I ended up making it home at 8:32...sunset was at 8:33. I cut it pretty close!

This family plot is actually in someone's yard. In rural Georgia, that's not completely uncommon. I saw more than one today but this was the nicest one.

I want a piece of land like this one!

Or this one...

I wandered around for a couple of hours and decided I needed to figure out how to get home. I figured out basically where I was when I got to Carl. I know how to get home from there at least.

At my turnoff, there was this cemetery that I didn't visit last time I rode by it. It was hot so I decided it was time for a break and spent about 15 minutes walking around it. There's a section with newer headstones but I like to see the older ones. Most of the headstone are from the late 1800's to the early 1900's.

This headstone was laying flat on the ground...a popular way of doing it along time ago (at least in this region). The headstone is actually a capstone that is placed on top of a box made of stones. So the elements have had a long time to work on eroding the surface. Most are very hard to read. I was able to make out a year on one of them though. Crazy!!! I don't know if that's the birth date or the death date...either way, it's really old!

This statue was next to a headstone I couldn't read but each headstone in this bed was small and the rest only had initials...which is how they did the headstones for infants who died at birth.

This bed is all for one family. The parents share a headstone there are 12 more. 5 of them have a name and a single date. Each of these 5 were born and died the same day. I am thinking the other 7 were infants who didn't make it to full term? So sad! They had to face so much loss back then! That's one thing that makes me glad I live today and not back then.

Finally, I found the dirt road that I would have to take to get me back to familiar ground. Several people sped by and left a swirling cloud of dust in their wakes that I then had in my mouth, eyes and lungs (still wheezing).

But the dust they kicked up was creating cool light effects as it broke through the trees.

When I got home, Adam had just pulled dinner out of the oven. Talk about a happy coincidence! :o)