Rockmart

What else has been going on lately...?

It appears that about a month ago I rode to Rockmart.

Yes, it's coming back to me now...

Billy called me during the week and proposed a ride with his buddy Lee on the Silver Comet, out to Rockmart and back. This sounded like a great idea, and I met the two of them at the mile-0 trailhead the next Sunday morning, bright and early. I'd never met Lee, but he guessed who I was, I think because I was the only guy in the lot still putting gear together as he rode by.

Billy was a little late, but he got ready quickly and we rolled out sometime shortly after 8 AM.

There was actually a guy ahead of us on the trail with an older Bicycle Outfitters Racing jersey. I didn't know him, but he knew my brother, and thought that I was him.

It's funny, that used to happen a lot. In fact, there were quite a few people who didn't realize there were two of us, for years.

We rode with them for a while, but eventually pulled ahead, somewhere near the Paulding County border.

We seemed to be making really good time, despite keeping a recreational pace and chatting almost non-stop.

There are a few sights along the way from Smyrna to Rockmart, but the most notable is the Brushy Mountain Tunnel.

Which we stopped and took a short break on the west side of.

When we got to Rockmart proper we took a detour off of the trail and ended up in the parking lot for the trailhead. At that moment, I realized that the little spot downtown that I thought was the trailhead, wasn't actually it. I'd never been to the real trailhead before.

I'd long heard that Ed Baltes' sculpture was at "the trailhead", but when I'd looked for it in the past, and failed to find it, I figured it had been moved or taken down. Nope. It was, in fact, at "the trailhead", I just had to also be at "the trailhead" to see it.

Woohoo!

Nice work Ed.

And, apparently, it's a Pokestop too.

We'd arrived in Rockmart almost an hour ahead of schedule. Apparently, again, despite our recreational pace, we'd made unbelievably good time, and none of the restaurants were even open yet, so we milled around downtown for the next half hour or so until finally someone did open.

That someone was The Rock Cafe, at which Billy and I have enjoyed many a pizza in years past.

They had a breakfast special going that morning though, and I got some kind of ham croissant with a side of fruit. When the server described the special, my mind lit up. I realized that I hungered for nothing else, and rarely has a meal satisfied so precisely. I'm starting to get hungry now, just thinking about it. I wonder if it would be wrong to drive to Rockmart for an early lunch tomorrow.

At any rate, we devoured our brunch and got back on the trail right away.

It's shallow, but it's just one long climb from Rockmart to the tunnel. You don't really notice it until its over though, and then you're like: "Man, I guess we've been climbing for miles now..." when it finally flattens out.

Billy cracked somewhere between there and the Cobb County line. I remember him sitting on for a bit of the ride back, before finally recovering in the vicinity of Floyd Road.

Fortunately, from Floyd Road to the lot, is a similar, long, shallow descent, and we had a really good time of that.

You'd think a run out to Rockmart and back on the Comet would be an easy day, but about an hour later I passed out on the couch and didn't wake up until dinner time.

Ha, ha! Not so easy indeed.