January and mid-winter - time to get away for a while. Instead of to the Southwest, it's off to the Southeast and a wedding ceremony for daughter Kara at Ft. Gordon, Georgia.
When I was a teenaged Marine private laboring through boot camp, the last thing I could have imagined was to one day have a daughter who would be career army, holding the rank of major. Unbelievable.
I confess to bias, but she's a good looking kid - not a kid anymore, obviously - who, while single, wore a wedding band at the gym to fend off the guys. So, what happens? She meets another army major; they hit it off, and decide to tie the knot. Patience pays off. We're all very happy about that.
Sherry and I toss some gear into the car and head to Georgia for the big event. It's another cold January day, but no snow and the roads are clear. We cross into Illinois and roll through Freeport, its claim to fame as having hosted one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates a century and a half ago.
South of Freeport, we roll through the small town of Forreston that once held annual sauerkraut festivals. It was that exercise that gave some Monroe residents the idea for a Cheeseday festival back in 1914. That event has become the biennial three-day Green County Cheese Days celebration, the next one scheduled for this coming September.
We reach Dixon, the Midwestern town where Ronald Reagan grew up. The iconic Republican figure often reminisced about the smalltown America he knew while growing up. But as much as he lamented the passing of America as he knew it, he never returned to Dixon.
When crossing the bridge over the Rock River at Dixon, I can't help thinking that there is a trickle of water in that river that comes from the spring in the pasture of the home farm. When a kid on the farm, my dad told me how the creek formed by that spring flows into Skinner Creek, into the Pecatonica River, and into the rock, eventually finding its way to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. "Whaddaya know," I thought - the Mississippi originates from the spring on the home farm. Well - sort of, anyway.
We soon reach Mendota, the hometown of one of my former colleagues in the New Mexico State University agricultural economics department that I headed for some 11 years. The sun has set on this short winter day and we move on to I-39, heading south. At Bloomington-Normal, we switch to I-74 southeast to Champaign, Illinois, home of the University of Illinois, then to I-57 south. Fortunately, although it's cold, the roads are clear.
Farther south, we branch off to I-24. At the southern tip of Illinois, we turn east and cross the Ohio River into Kentucky. Indiana likes to bill itself as "crossroads of America." I think that honor should go to Illinois - it's a long way from Illinois' border with Wisconsin to its southern tip. As you cross the Ohio River into Kentucky, you know you are definitely in the South. We grab a Days Inn at Calvert City, just east of Paducah, Kentucky. Calvert City is just a few miles from the tragic school shooting that occurred just a few days before. That has hit the area hard. At the hotel we learn the attendant went to school with grandparents of some of the victims, and we meet EMS personnel who had been called to the scene.
The next day, we head east and south, across the Tennessee line to Nashville, and southeast on I-24 to Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's another 120 miles to Atlanta, the city that I dread. No, not the city itself, but getting through it - no feasible way of going around it, and a nightmare getting through it. But as the saying goes, "it is what it is." We get through it, and go the final 150 miles to Augusta, Georgia and Ft. Gordon.
For those of my era who recall grade school geography - that interesting subject was actually taught to kids back in the 1940s - recall that the teacher would describe America's geography from east to west. She would start with the Atlantic Coastal Plain, continue to the Piedmont, and on to the Appalachian "old worn down" Mountains, and then on west.
At the division of the coastal plain and the Piedmont is a fault line running north and south. As the rivers from the Appalachian Mountains flow east to the ocean, they cross that fault line, resulting in rapids or falls. This feature created a source of power for mills, as well as marked the head of navigation for water transport to and from the ocean. Naturally, settlements sprung up at these sites. Augusta, Georgia, on the Savannah River is an example of settlements originating on rivers rising in the Appalachians and flowing across that fault line.
Ft. Gordon originated as Camp Gordon back in 1917. After WWII, the U.S. Army relocated its military police school there and established a signal corps training center. Between the 1950s and 1980s the post was used for advanced infantry training for soldiers scheduled for the Airborne Corps. Seems like a lot of former soldiers I know have been stationed at Ft. Gordon: Roger Stauffacher, Junior Robertson, Art Carter, and former NMSU colleague, Willie Lujan.
Ft. Gordon is now the army's Cyber Command Center headquarters, having been selected over Ft. Meade, Maryland. Daughter Kara is with the Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center where she met her husband.
We arrived in Augusta at what we thought was a day earlier than necessary. But as anyone having gone through the process knows, there are millions of details to attend to for a wedding ceremony.
Considering nerves and all, everything went well, even the weather. We're all thrilled with the marriage of the two army majors.
It's still hard for a former Marine corporal to believe.
- John Waelti's column appears every Friday in the Times. He can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net.
When I was a teenaged Marine private laboring through boot camp, the last thing I could have imagined was to one day have a daughter who would be career army, holding the rank of major. Unbelievable.
I confess to bias, but she's a good looking kid - not a kid anymore, obviously - who, while single, wore a wedding band at the gym to fend off the guys. So, what happens? She meets another army major; they hit it off, and decide to tie the knot. Patience pays off. We're all very happy about that.
Sherry and I toss some gear into the car and head to Georgia for the big event. It's another cold January day, but no snow and the roads are clear. We cross into Illinois and roll through Freeport, its claim to fame as having hosted one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates a century and a half ago.
South of Freeport, we roll through the small town of Forreston that once held annual sauerkraut festivals. It was that exercise that gave some Monroe residents the idea for a Cheeseday festival back in 1914. That event has become the biennial three-day Green County Cheese Days celebration, the next one scheduled for this coming September.
We reach Dixon, the Midwestern town where Ronald Reagan grew up. The iconic Republican figure often reminisced about the smalltown America he knew while growing up. But as much as he lamented the passing of America as he knew it, he never returned to Dixon.
When crossing the bridge over the Rock River at Dixon, I can't help thinking that there is a trickle of water in that river that comes from the spring in the pasture of the home farm. When a kid on the farm, my dad told me how the creek formed by that spring flows into Skinner Creek, into the Pecatonica River, and into the rock, eventually finding its way to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. "Whaddaya know," I thought - the Mississippi originates from the spring on the home farm. Well - sort of, anyway.
We soon reach Mendota, the hometown of one of my former colleagues in the New Mexico State University agricultural economics department that I headed for some 11 years. The sun has set on this short winter day and we move on to I-39, heading south. At Bloomington-Normal, we switch to I-74 southeast to Champaign, Illinois, home of the University of Illinois, then to I-57 south. Fortunately, although it's cold, the roads are clear.
Farther south, we branch off to I-24. At the southern tip of Illinois, we turn east and cross the Ohio River into Kentucky. Indiana likes to bill itself as "crossroads of America." I think that honor should go to Illinois - it's a long way from Illinois' border with Wisconsin to its southern tip. As you cross the Ohio River into Kentucky, you know you are definitely in the South. We grab a Days Inn at Calvert City, just east of Paducah, Kentucky. Calvert City is just a few miles from the tragic school shooting that occurred just a few days before. That has hit the area hard. At the hotel we learn the attendant went to school with grandparents of some of the victims, and we meet EMS personnel who had been called to the scene.
The next day, we head east and south, across the Tennessee line to Nashville, and southeast on I-24 to Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's another 120 miles to Atlanta, the city that I dread. No, not the city itself, but getting through it - no feasible way of going around it, and a nightmare getting through it. But as the saying goes, "it is what it is." We get through it, and go the final 150 miles to Augusta, Georgia and Ft. Gordon.
For those of my era who recall grade school geography - that interesting subject was actually taught to kids back in the 1940s - recall that the teacher would describe America's geography from east to west. She would start with the Atlantic Coastal Plain, continue to the Piedmont, and on to the Appalachian "old worn down" Mountains, and then on west.
At the division of the coastal plain and the Piedmont is a fault line running north and south. As the rivers from the Appalachian Mountains flow east to the ocean, they cross that fault line, resulting in rapids or falls. This feature created a source of power for mills, as well as marked the head of navigation for water transport to and from the ocean. Naturally, settlements sprung up at these sites. Augusta, Georgia, on the Savannah River is an example of settlements originating on rivers rising in the Appalachians and flowing across that fault line.
Ft. Gordon originated as Camp Gordon back in 1917. After WWII, the U.S. Army relocated its military police school there and established a signal corps training center. Between the 1950s and 1980s the post was used for advanced infantry training for soldiers scheduled for the Airborne Corps. Seems like a lot of former soldiers I know have been stationed at Ft. Gordon: Roger Stauffacher, Junior Robertson, Art Carter, and former NMSU colleague, Willie Lujan.
Ft. Gordon is now the army's Cyber Command Center headquarters, having been selected over Ft. Meade, Maryland. Daughter Kara is with the Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center where she met her husband.
We arrived in Augusta at what we thought was a day earlier than necessary. But as anyone having gone through the process knows, there are millions of details to attend to for a wedding ceremony.
Considering nerves and all, everything went well, even the weather. We're all thrilled with the marriage of the two army majors.
It's still hard for a former Marine corporal to believe.
- John Waelti's column appears every Friday in the Times. He can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net.
