Travels With Tom-Tom

My wife and I went up to Chattanooga last week. I didn’t need a GPS to get there, but I took it with me anyway, since I planned a little side trip on our way home.

I got my GPS about three years ago, and on my first trip using it we wound up on a farmer’s field instead of at our hotel, so I have never completely trusted the unit. However, I used the GPS last year on my Northwest trip, and it performed beautifully.

Then I used it again this year on my trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and on my trip to Hells Canyon in Oregon. Again it did a good job of getting me around.

So when I decided to route us across Tennessee and North Carolina and down into the mountains of Northern Georgia, I figured it would get us there okay.

Well, it proved me wrong, and it made an approximate 5-hour trip into a 9-hour odyssey.

When I programmed the trip from Chattanooga to Tallulah Falls in, the GPS unit wanted to route me down to Atlanta on I-75, then up I-85 and I-985 to get there. Now, that might have been the shortest route time wise, but what fun was that? I wanted to see the wild country.

I took a more direct route across the mountains. Well, that was a big mistake.

Do you recall the movie Deliverance with Burt Reynolds and John Voigt? Well, we weren’t by the Caloosahachie River, but the Ocoee River looks like the one they used in the movie. Thank God we didn’t have any breakdowns, but we sure did get lost a few times. I kept looking for the snaggle-toothed hillbilly and the banjo playin’ kid.

First, I had to go “off route” to get the GPS to recalculate. Fortunately, my GPS doesn’t have that annoying voice that says, “ree-calc-u-lating.” Second, Judy can’t stand the voice commands anyway, so she mutes the sound.

Even so, once we went off route, the GPS screen kept pointing arrows at me to reverse direction. When it finally did a reroute to conform to the direction we were headed, it still didn’t like my choices, and continued to give me updates.

At one crossroads I turned the way the GPS directed, and was immediately off the map. We wound up executing three loops around the same roads before we got back on the right track according to the GPS. Then we went off route again on an open stretch of road—try that one—and finally pulled over at a gas station and general store in a little crossroads called Brasstown.

There was what appeared to be a dead possum hanging by its tail over the door, so Judy refused to go in with me. Come to think of it, I don’t know what possessed me to go in myself. I think the gas pumps were the old-fashioned crank type. There was one of those large mouth jars on the counter with some pink hardboiled eggs in it, too—probably pickled years ago.

I took my maps in with me and asked the owner for directions to Tallulah Falls. Of course, he had no idea where that was, so I showed him on the Georgia map—we were in North Carolina, by the way. He then gave me some directions, which his wife wrote down for me, based on one of their “Sunday trips in the country”. (What the heck did he think Brasstown is?)

It won’t make any sense, but the fellow got into some homespun tale about his last trip to “that state below Georgia.” I started to volunteer the state’s name, Florida, but he said his wife does not allow him to use the “f-word” so he refers to it only as “the state below Georgia”—I swear I didn’t make that up. Needless to say, I didn’t ask why.

Well, we got back under way and after several more near misses, including seeing a sign at another crossroad pointing to “Brasstown” after we had made two turns already, we arrived at the town of Clayton. GA. That was where we finally picked up the correct route down to Tallulah Falls. It took four-and-a-half hours to go the 170 miles from Chattanooga, and we got to our destination at about 1:30 in the afternoon.>

Tallulah Falls was a nice place to visit and we even went on to another waterfall that is on the campus of Toccoa Falls College in Toccoa, Georgia. Even that was an adventure—I had to walk through the college bookstore and out a back door to get to the waterfall—but we made it home to Augusta late in the afternoon.

What could have been an easy 5-hour drive from Chattanooga to Augusta became a full day of driving and used just about a full tank of gas. But what a fun trip it was! I took lots of pictures, too.