Loud thunderstorms and rain last night kept me awake wondering if I would be riding at all today. We woke up to partly sunny skies though, so we lucked out again. The only unpleasant part of the forecast for today was a 15 mile per hour headwind.

As it turned out, the predicted headwind didn’t come into play until about noon, so I had about four hours of riding through mostly calm air. Very nice.

During the 62-mile ride on country roads to Abbeville, I saw a lot of churches and they frequently had cemeteries nearby. The cemeteries around here are different than the ones we’ve seen in other parts of the country. I’ve been seeing this kind of cemetery for the last couple of weeks. I finally took the time today to stop and take a photo of one a few miles north of Geneva, Alabama. They seem to be sectioned off by various kinds of concrete and stone walls. I think it’s to section off the graves belonging to a single family, but I’m not sure.

This next picture was taken at the same cemetery. The sign reads “Notice: No setting of coping, staking off plots, or opening of grave sites without permission of church”. Opening of grave sites? Have they had problems of this kind in the past?

This next photo shows some typical terrain that I rode through today. Same pattern as for the last few days of riding: The roads are pretty flat for a while, then you have a nice descent to the river valley floor, ride a bit on the valley floor, cross a river, ride some more on the valley floor, then climb back out and ride on some flat farmland area for a while. The only difference today is the descents and ascents were a bigger and steeper than in past days. This is probably a hint of the hillier terrain we’ll in the coming days.

These remaining photos are from Abbeville itself. I took them after I finished riding. We hopped in the car to take a look around town. Abbeville looked pretty small on the map, so we weren’t expecting the town to have much in the way of sights to see, but it was a surprisingly active and well-maintained downtown. It’s due in part to the founder of a large wood processing company based in Abbeville. He has funded some major renovation in the downtown area. Apparently, he’s a fan of early twentieth century American life and the various parts of town reflect this interest. The “service station” in the photos below is actually the corporate headquarters of his company. The gas pumps do actually work. We spoke with one of the employees who said that the company cars fill-up at those pumps. Not at the price shown on those pumps, I’m sure because the price shown is 17.9 cents per gallon. He then invited us inside to take a look around. It has everything that you would expect from a modern corporate office — computers, break rooms, conference rooms, copy machines — but it also had all this memorabilia. And not just in the entryway; the whole office space was a shrine to the American automotive industry.

The man funding the renovation also has a new business venture in town. Following the twentieth century Americana theme, it’s a new soda fountain and restaurant in downtown Abbeville. It’s called “Huggin’ Molly’s”. The name is based on a local Abbeville legend told to children. Huggin’ Molly is a 7-foot town ghost that locals say would roam the streets after dark hugging unsuspecting victims.

The restaurant is scheduled to open in a few weeks (the sign out from says “Coming (to get you) Soon”. We’re told that the interior will be an exact replica of the soda fountain from Mr. Gower’s drug store in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

We wandered into a local restaurant to check on the hours. Next to the cash register was this electronic parrot that would repeat everything you said. It’s a little disconcerting to hear what you just said echoed back to you when you don’t know the thing is there. But, I didn’t take the photo because of the parrot; I took it because of the Bayer aspirin paperweight to the left of it.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 6:39 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.