Travel Adventures // Cromer's Mill Covered Bridge

This may strike y'all as a bit strange but when I travel locally I really prefer to do so by my lonesome.  Now, I'm a super introvert who spends a lot of my time striving daily to be more extroverted (as any of you who work in any public service based industry can understand) so I often need time to recharge the ol' internal batteries.  And traveling around to bridges, small towns, markets, whatever, with my truck windows down and singing at the top of my lungs and taking pictures (some good & some bad) and eating roadside fruit from tiny Mom & Pop stands are all the things that help reset all the buttons life likes to push.

Going back to that 'traveling around to bridges' part, I found myself over at Cromer's Mill Covered Bridge in Carnesville, GA (about 40 minutes away from Athens) not too long ago...

The area around the bridge looks pretty neglected (and read on for more about that road!) and there was a ton of trash around but the bridge is in really good shape considering the age and the limited repair its received.  Plus there were tons of flowers about, including my favorite Spider Lily, and the creek was high enough to do a bit of wading in.  Nice!

To be honest, this is the first time on my solo adventures that I got a wee bit concerned about being in the middle of nowhere.  My first attempt at approaching the bridge put me on one of the worst rutted and overgrown roads I've ever driven on...and I've driven on some bad roads here in the heavy snow areas of the western US, in the mountains of Puerto Rico and in the hills of Croatia.  None of them compared to this one Georgia road.  I seriously thought our 4-wheel drive truck might get stuck down this little road so many miles away from home (and from AAA) and my phone had no service.  There were a few homes around but they had signs with things like 'shoot first, ask questions later' and 'the south will rise again!' and I do not mess around with that shit.  Most folks in the world are nice enough but when they advertise that kind of stuff I don't take my chances.  I finally said 'oh hell NO' and reversed myself right out of there and made it back to the main road with no problems other than a lot of bouncing and jarring and things sliding off of seats.  Whew!

I decided to drive over the main bridge spanning the river (Nail's Creek, to be exact) and see if I could approach it from that angle, and to my surprise I found a super easy and short path directly to the bridge.  Thankfully, it's also in plain sight of the main road because some super sketch dudes showed up with a cooler of beer and some bad vibes and freaked me out.  Not what I wanted/expected but I did a) get some pictures, albeit in the mid-day sun and b) get about 30 minutes of me time before I was forced to leave by drunken idiots.

While it was soooooooooooo not cool that some 'hey baby' guys showed up at a freaking covered bridge drunk as skunks and ready to cause trouble, it is something I almost never deal with and I feel like I handled it appropriately and I refuse to be cowed about adventuring out on my own.  Although I decided that I am not going anywhere where I don't have cell service (that road made me double think my approach...literally and figuratively) and I'm giving Brady my schedule/route so someone knows where I'm at just in case something happens.  It's the unfortunate reality that women have to be aware at all times in all situations in order to feel safer and to help eschew blame if something were to happen.  I mean, just look at how people have responded to the rhetoric from this election.  *sigh*  I'd like to rant and rave but this was supposed to be a post about finding a cool covered bridge!  I'll save all that for another time but I have a feeling that most of y'all know how I feel and how I'm voting and all that jazz...

So, this trip did somewhat recharge my batteries but it also got my adrenaline flowing.  Luckily, the produce guy was super nice and even gave me a few apples for free after I told him my story.  See, nice people are out there!

On the way back home I found this little church and adjoining cemetery that had more granite on, in and around it than any other church I've seen.  The foundation was granite!  Even the sign with its classic font was granite.  Red clay + white clapboard + granite = rural northern Georgia memories for me.  They are quite the combo...

And as you can see that as of last week some of our leaves are still a ways away from changing in many places.  While Athens is starting to really look like fall, other spots are still holding onto summer.  With temperatures in the 80's this week, how can you blame the trees for being confused?