2009-03-04 I'm back in the flat lands. There is a lot of standing water thanks to this weekend's storms. While biking along I considered that if it were warmer in a few weeks that water would spawn swarms of man-eating mosquitoes. Boy was I wrong. I am being swarmed by them now. Normally I would retreat to the shelter of my netted hammock, but a hammock is worse than useless when the temperature falls below forty, which it is supposed to do tonight. So in an odd turn of events I find myself wishing it would get colder sooner. Which is the exact opposite of my attitude this morning. It seemed like I could never get out from under the clouds into the warm sun. The sun finally did find me, though, prompting me to purchase and apply some SPF 50. No more sunburned nose for me. Sadly it has been too cold for me to sunburn any other part of my anatomy. I found a useful piece of road swag today. Somebody lost a Nike backpack. It is barely a sack with strings, but it is light and takes up no space and is exactly what I was trying to find to bring with me. It's probably a girl's bag, but oh well. With my freak bicycle clothes and my freak vibram hiking shoes it should fit right in. At one point I spied a dog sleeping belly up and whistled at it for fun. Bad idea. Immediately three big mutts were giving chase. Let sleeping dogs lie. Something interesting about Georgia: Every road (that I've been on at least) has mile markers. This would actually be cool and helpful if they weren't so random. For instance at one point I was passing eight, nine and ten in what seemed like reasonable times. A few miles later I passed eleven. Shortly after that I passed three. All on the same road. And that was not an anomaly. So I find myself camping in a tree farm (no shortage of those) dotted with palmettos and inhabited by lots of mosquitoes. Where there aren't pines there are oaks draped with spanish moss. There is plenty of green, but it seems to be from plants that don't lose their leaves (which I suspect have a cool scientific name that I can't find right now). Tomorrow I will make my way through Homerville and on south.

making camp go away clouds Alapaha River