Normally I’d do one of these posts using the photo gallery on this blog, but I want to tell more of a story than just photo captions.
We got up this morning with a plan to head out to Apalachee, Georgia, a place I’d been before on my own that I wanted to show Suzanne. There’s an old, tiny cemetery out there, and a few ruins of old buildings. There’s also the old Apalachee schoolhouse, which is probably the only preserved building in the area.
By the way, if you can tell from the pictures I generally take, I can’t pass a ruin without taking a picture of it. There’s something picturesque about these abandoned buildings that just calls to me.
We took a new route out to Apalachee to explore some new roads. Somewhere east of Lawrenceville, I saw this place.
I shot this with my phone, facing backwards from the seat of the motorcycle. The detailing on this place is amazing, particularly the fireplace in the center. The light streak up the side and the break in the roof gable is where the chimney was. A really great shot, and we just got started.
We kept going out to Apalachee. First stop was the Apalachee-Prior cemetery. I took some pictures, and we wandered around reading old gravestones a while. Here’s a shot I took of it last time I was there – none of the new ones really are worth seeing.
It’s oddly idyllic there. We went from there to “downtown” Apalachee, which consists of two parallel roads. Like I said, I’d been here before, but something I never noticed was in the space between the two roads – disused, overgrown railroad tracks.
This particular spot shows where the tracks separate into two lines.
The whole length of this you can see, all those scrub trees cover railroad tracks. And it only now dawned on me why – they can’t mow there, the tracks are in the way! It also, to me, explains why this town, like so many others in Georgia, came and went. It came with the rails, and it died with the rails.
The tracks apparently lasted long enough so that paved roads had been built around them, but those days are long gone. Here’s a shot of what I believe to have been the original general store in Apalachee, which we didn’t stop to take pics of today.
After hitting the end of that road, and turning onto the parallel road, we found this series of old storefronts.
Not sure what kind of businesses they were back in the day, but what was interesting was this – the names on top were the two most common names in the cemetery. I imagine there’s still some Shockleys and Priors in the general area.
As we started to head further down the parallel road, Suzanne spotted this old house on the parallel road. I found a cut through, and we went to look.
The two doors in the center of this one I thought were interesting, made me wonder if it was designed to house two families, maybe with a common stove in the middle.
On the way out we passed the Old Apalachee Schoolhouse, which I’d photographed before.
From here, we headed towards Monroe, GA, to one of our favorite restaurants in the area, the Cotton Cafe, in hopes that one of our favorite characters, Bob, would be there.
After lunch at the Cotton Cafe, we stopped in the pocket park on the main drag, and interacted with the local artwork.
And then homeward bound. A nice, relaxing day on the bike in East Georgia.