Day 22: Savannah, GA - Larrington Towers

Friday night and I am out on the hotel porch, smoking a fag.  Out of the gloom emerges a large round black geezer; he has been busy advising a bunch of pissed-up tourists as to why they should visit his brother-in-law's crab shack on Tybee Island instead of any of the inferior seafood outlets thereabouts when he spots me:

LRBG: So where you from?
Me: England.
LRBG: Lemme guess.  Yorkshire or Essex?

Had I not been leaning against a pillar I should have fallen over.  For those not acquainted with the personal circumstances of your Diarist, I  am from $DEITY's Own County and have lived in what used to be Essex since about 1988.  My flabber is well and truly ghasted.

Saturday morning and what better way to start the day than by sitting in a rocking chair, southern-stylee, and watching an entire trainload of the USA's trade deficit passing by while drinking coffee and reading the paper?  But the hotel wants me out by eleven, so back on the road it is.

More horrible bumpy concrete on I-16, more pine trees, more miles of bugger-all.  At Macon it's right onto old pal I-75 again.  I head vaguely north again for a few miles and then pull off to chillax for a couple of hours at High Falls State Park, where there is shade, and tree-rats, and a lizard on the rest-room floor.  Remember that this is the South, so you don't just run willy-nilly into the bogs with a camera...

High Falls State Park.  Niiiiice,

And so to Hartsfield-Jackson airport.  John Jackson once lived here for a year, and probably not for a bet.  Return the motor-car with seven and a half thousand more miles on the wossname than it had three weeks ago.  No eyebrows are raised.

Ms. Homeland-Security does not like me, for my boarding card reads "LARRINGTON/D".  "That could be Diana" she says before making me hobble half the length of the building to get a new one.  Piss.  Surely the South is not infested with bearded Dianas?

Through security, buy fags & scotch, drink Hoegaarden.  Praise the wossname; there is an airside "Smokers' Lounge" here.  It is equipped with maximum-security-prison-stylee steel benches and an air-con system of frozen meat locker output.  After ten minutes I was shivering and sought refuge on a nice warm aeroplane.

We leave on time and in budget, and the driver has his clog down, so we arrive in an apparently sunny Londonton half an hour early.  Sunny?  Then when have we been descending through cloud for the past fifteen minutes?  Sho' 'nuff it is raining and cold and generally generating exactly the sort of ambience that is required at the end of one's holibobs.  And the first recognisable face I see on the Heathrow Express TV screen is Arsene Wenger...

Larrington Towers is at least still here, and it contains a sofa and three recorded F1 races, and BEER.  Next year: Project 48.5 concludes.  Stay tuned, Automatic Diary fans...