14-Mar-2001 -- After tasting disappointment at 32N 83W,
my father (Stuart) and I headed off to 33N 82W to attempt to redeem ourselves. Leaving
McRae, we wound through middle Georgia on state highways, passing through Adrian,
Swainsboro, Twin City, and Millen before closing in on the tiny towns of Idlewood and
Thomas Station. We turned off US-25 on to a small dirt road headed west, and then on to
a smaller dirt road headed south. After pausing a moment to synchronize ourselves
between our maps and our aerial imagery from Terrasever, we moved in on the point.
We arrived at one last fork of the road, and spotting a gentleman working on his truck,
we took the fork away from the point to seek permission.
The man (picture #1) and his dogs (picture #2) proved to be quite friendly and was
perfectly happy to allow us to cross his grandmother's land to reach the point. After giving
him our Terraserver images of his land as a goodwill gesture, we drove the truck back to
the fork and proceeded on foot. We crossed a field of already-picked bent and broken
cotton plants, and with success in our grasp our excitement began to grow. Although
Terraserver showed the point shy of the trees that marked the end of the field, I began
to worry that we were running out of room, but the GPS receiver told us we were within
a few feet before we had to enter the woods. After a few minutes of desperately trying
to zero out both the lat/long and the "distance to go" readout on the GPS, we got the
zeroes we were looking for and declared success. We took pictures of each other
standing on the point as well as in the four cardinal directions, although it was all cotton
pretty much whichever way you looked.
We headed out, pleased to have batted .500 on the day. On the way home, we
passed within two miles of 33N 83W, but since the sun had set and aerial pictures seemed
to indicate a tough point to reach, we drove on, arriving thirty minutes late for weekly
trivia night with friends at a local restaurant.