Getting into Macon yesterday was easy; getting through Macon in the early morning commuter traffic turned out to be very difficult.

After an hour and a half of zig-zagging through suburban Macon, I finally found myself on a road headed out of town that was tolerable traffic-wise. To get there, I had taken sidewalks, crosswalks, residential streets, busy commuter streets, and finally hopped a gate to get onto a relatively quiet country road. What I didn’t realize until ten miles further down the road was it was the WRONG road. There was a quick way back onto the road I wanted to be on, but getting lost that way added 15 miles to an already long day. When I finally got to Madison, my odometer read 82 miles. The third day in a row of 80 miles or more. Time for a rest day!

And what a great town for a rest day! Madison has one of Georgia’s largest Historic Districts and has a large collection of examples of antebellum and Victorian architecture. It’s large collection is probably because Madison is known as the only town that General Sherman refused to burn on his “March to the Sea” towards the end of the Civil War. It was during that campaign that the Union Army burned and destroyed nearly everything in their path from Atlanta to Savannah.

We had a bit of time this afternoon to look around downtown. The courthouse (below) is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Here’s a picture of the Magnolia House, which was one of the few houses near downtown that you can good a good photo of because it lacks a front yard full of big trees. Interestingly, when it was restored recently, a trap door was discovered. That door led to a tunnel that went next door to the Madison Presbyterian Church. The purpose of the tunnel is unknown, but speculation is that it was part of the Underground Railroad.

Tomorrow, on our rest day, we’re going to take the walking tour of Madison’s historic district. I’ll post some highlights of that tour.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 7:49 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.