An interrupted night’s sleep and a low quality breakfast started out the day. Oh well, not every day starts great on the road.
Today would take us through Mississippi, Alabama and into Georgia. Still hot, but the landscape changed to large, beautiful green trees, with lots of traffic. We always try to capture the "Welcome" signs as we come into a new state. Sometimes we get them, and sometimes they go by too quickly.
Our primary reason to go to Atlanta was for our final presidential library visit: Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
As we drove the five hours to get to the Carter Center, we read the final chapter of our guidebook we have used for a number of years as we visited these 13 libraries administered by the US National Archives. The book by David Cross was called “Chasing History: one man’s road trip through the presidential libraries.” It gave us a good start before each library of what to look for, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of each museum. Patti even found a CSPAN video of a talk the author gave about his book and his travels that we listened to while driving.
This led us to reflect on what we learned when visiting these 13 libraries in 10 different states over the past nine years. We began our discussion on this before we arrived at the Jimmy Carter Library. If you ever want to know more about the presidential libraries, ask us.
Here are some highlights of the Jimmy Carter Library. Carter had been considered one of the United State's worst presidents. This was not really for anything terrible he did like crash the economy or start a war or have personal or political scandals. Truly, he mostly had the bad fortune for being president when the oil crisis and the Iran-hostage crisis was happening.
Carter was a devout Christian who promised and kept his word to always tell the truth which didn’t always serve him well politically. He had difficult decisions to make and made them to the best of his abilities.
More than nearly every other president, Carter was an ex-president for such a long time and became one of the most beloved and respected former presidents. The Carter Center did and continues to work for people around the world and to promote peace and freedom from disease. He was especially known for his hands on work for Habitat for Humanity, building houses around the world. And, Rosalynn did tremendous work around the issue of mental illness as well as a lot of other work, promoting rights for women and children.
There were a couple of photos with Carter and many other former presidents. You could see how long of a lifespan he had.
There was a video where Rosalynn said when she was campaigning she got asked every day "Don’t you hate politics, where everyone gets to know everything about you?" She answered “ I lived in and still live in Plains, Georgia with less than 700 people. Everybody has always known everything about me.”
During our current time of high uncertainty in the Middle East, we also marveled at the Camp David Accord
where he brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, against basically all odds. He singled handedly worked to bring about a lasting peace agreement between these countries who had been enemies for eons. Phenomenal work, and it earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.
When we were nearly done with the museum, there was a display focusing on all of the different presidential museums. A man approached Patti and asked if we had visited any others? We told him that this was our final one and he congratulated us and let us know that he had also visited all 13 of the current presidential libraries. We spent some time talking together about the various libraries and about how none of us had ever met anyone else who had visited all of them. It takes a certain kind of person to take on this kind of assignment. But it was very fun to meet somebody else who also had enjoyed it. Nice to meet you, Jayson, from Oklahoma City.
And just as we were leaving, we had a delightful conversation with a young woman sitting at the entrance desk. As it turned out, she was another history major (like us) who had gotten her masters degree in American history last year. We exchanged information about our bachelors in history and our interest in finding history majors around the world. What fun to find another one. History majors are indeed everywhere.
Once we were done at the library, on to our hotel which meant battling Atlanta freeway traffic, which was not so fun. So we were delighted to find right on the other side of the parking lot from our hotel was an Atlanta ribs and barbecue place. Sounded good to us and we ate our fill of barbecue. It was a full but rich and inspiring day.
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