Travel Blog

 I crossed into Georgia around noon, had a quick lunch in Valdosta, and then got off I-75 in Perry. The New Perry Hotel, where I had stayed on my last drive up the Interstate, was closed, so I drove back to the exit and picked one of the chains.

I was on my way to Atlanta for a reading and an interview for Georgia Public Broadcasting. The show’s description made it sound Georgia-centric, so I prepared for questions about my travels in the state. Atlanta, it occurred to me, was the first place I ever traveled to on assignment. It was in the mid-80s; I was working for the Observer of the American College of Physicians in Philadelphia, and my editor sent me down to cover a conference on preventive medicine at the CDC. A few years later I returned to write about a professor at Emory University School of Medicine who had his students read literary classics; I joined them at Manuel’s Tavern for their discussion of Madame Bovary. In 1996, when I was a travel editor, I wrote about the city as it prepared for the Summer Olympics, throwing in a visit to Milledgeville, home of Flannery O’Connor and then soon-to-be host of the badminton teams. (Peacocks and shuttlecocks.)

A wave of storms was sweeping across the South but I arrived in Atlanta before the rain and checked into the Highland Inn, just one block down from Manuel’s Tavern. By the time I headed out to A Cappella Books for my evening reading the skies had cleared. It was a small, well-appointed store at the end of a damp residential street. Frank Reiss told me that he had started it 27 years ago, when he was 27. Soon, my dear friend Susan arrived with her husband, her mother, and two former colleagues in tow, proving herself to be the perfect friend.

But enough nonpartisan people eventually arrived to fill the side room. Signing books, I learned that one of them – a soft-spoken young woman – was a member of the American College of Physicians. Afterwards, Susan and her entourage took me to dinner at Bread & Butterfly, which makes the best Croque Monsieur I have ever tasted. (And it would be even if they didn’t put a fried egg on top of it.)

The next morning I drove to Georgia Public Broadcasting, where Bill Nigut quoted lines not just from my new book but from old essays I’d written. But he didn’t ask about my adventures in Georgia.