The Adventures of Kinky Reggae: A Vagabond for Beauty

From Atlanta I drove to Alabama, where I visited the Tuskegee Airmen NHS, which is still a functioning airport! If you had your own plane, I think it would be really cool to visit these historic airports. I can’t remember much of what I learned there... what I mostly remember is thinking that these pilots were really good looking men!  I retraced my trip from last summer and drove the highway from Montgomery to Selma. Last summer, I didn’t make it all the way to Selma and was mad at myself for not seeing the bridge. This summer, I made it happen. It felt very profound, standing there and thinking about the events of Bloody Sunday. And the thing that struck me the most (about all of the civil rights sites) is that this stuff didn’t happen all that long ago! We’ve come a long way in the past 50 years, but we have a long way to go.  My hotel that night was in Jackson, Mississippi, so it was a long day of driving. I had to stop in Jackson because Medgar Evers’s home was recently declared a

I got to stay with Laura in Atlanta! Laura is someone I greatly admire. We went to the same church in Phoenix, where she worked as a public defender. In Atlanta, she has her own practice doing immigration law. Her work is so important, and it was interesting to hear what immigration actually looks like from someone who’s actually in the middle of all the mess, not just the media. It is even worse than I thought.  Anyway, on my first night there, her boyfriend came over and they made the most amazing dinner with homemade pesto. We sat out on her front porch and watched the fireflies and chatted for hours.  The next day, I visited Chattahoochee NRA, which wasn’t that exciting because it was way too hot to actually hike. Also, traffic was super stressful... I wasn’t a fan of driving in Atlanta! That night, Laura revealed that she had never seen Toy Story 3, so we watched that and both cried our eyes out. That movie gets me every time!

Okay, 5 months later, let’s keep talking about last summer’s national park quest. 😂 On my way to Atlanta I stopped at Ocmulgee National Monument, which was one of those unexpectedly awesome sites where I wanted to stay much longer. I always wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. (And honestly, the way teaching has been lately, I’m wondering if it’s too late in life for a career change). I’ve been to some other mound sites, and I hate to say this, but they were not exactly thrilling. I think Effigy Mounds in Iowa would have been better to see from the air, but the mound site in Ohio... I mean, it’s just mounds. So why was Ocmulgee so fascinating to me?? Who knows, maybe it just had a certain kind of energy. They also had lots of interesting artifacts and this earth lodge you could go in. The floor was 1000 years old.  Next up was Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, north of Atlanta. This was a popular recreation site; lots of bikers. This is something I’ve noticed about