Columbus, Mississippi

Miles Today:  0  /  Total Trip Miles: 304.6

Today’s photos are here. 

Went to bed late, got up early: not a good combination on a rest day.  It was 62° this morning and never got much warmer. This is Mississippi in mid-May?  The next couple of days are supposed to be warmer - at which point you’ll no doubt hear me griping about the heat & humidity. 

Cleaned my bike first thing then walked into Columbus.  The hotel where we’re staying is about a mile from downtown, set in among strip malls, box stores, and fast food restaurants.  

Entering town there was a monument honoring those “who nobly dared life and fortune in defense of the Southern Confederacy.”  

On Main Street, you got the feeling that the city was trying hard to keep from becoming a ghost town by sprucing up buildings & encouraging specialty shops to move in.

The Welcome Center is in the house where Tennessee Williams was born.  Inside, the hostess was wonderfully welcoming, loading me up with information about things to do and see in town (there’s a lot to do here - too much for one day!), and showed me a beautiful coffee table book with photographs of the interiors of the county’s magnificently restored nineteenth-century homes.  The town hosts an annual event called The Pilgrimage when its historic homes are open for the public. I’d love to come back for that.

I took off, following the Pilgrimage tour route on foot. Turned out to be a good way to explore the city.  There were 10,000 square foot antebellum homes, some in “Columbus Eclectic” style, which is a mishmash of architectural styles - Greek revivial, colonial, neoclassical, you name it - all thrown together on one house. Even more than the mansions, I liked the (considerably more modest) homes & cottages built between WWI and WWII - I call them “interbellum” style.  

Columbus is home to Mississippi University for Women, founded in 1884, the first state-supported college for women in the country. Now co-ed, it is on the Forbes Magazine list of “best public colleges” and is a U.S. News and World Report “best value or best buy” college.  It boasts that it “offers a private school education at a public school price.”  

By two o’clock, having been walking around since before nine, I was ready to put my feet up for a bit.  I’d planned on going to the Civil War cemetery and to the public library to see the collection of slavery documents, but I’d run out of juice.   So I went back to the hotel, planning on downloading and editing the day’s photos and writing my blog.  

Back in my room for just a few minutes,  the phone rang - it was Clark Taylor, who had been on the Mississippi ride last year and who has just finished riding the Southern Tier with WT.  Clark lives in Memphis, Tennessee and my first thought when I heard her voice was “isn’t she sweet to call to say hello on our layover day.”  But she wasn’t calling from Memphis: she was downstairs in the hotel lobby! 

Under the heading of it’s a small world:  turns out, Clark grew up in Columbus and had come here to visit her brother and see old friends.  Driving around town, she saw people on bikes and stopped to ask them if Columbus had a bike club, thinking, if it did, she’d bring her cycling gear the next time she visited.  The cyclists were Marni and Kirsten, whom Clark knew from the Meandering Mississippi ride!  It is a Small World!  Marni and Kirsten pointed Clark to our hotel and she came right over. Eleven people on the UGRR had been on the Mississippi ride and we had quite a reunion in the hotel lobby.  The rest of the afternoon was spent with Clark, hearing about her Southern Tier experiences and reminiscing.    

Which is why I didn’t get today’s blog done on time!