Home in Atlanta
Day 139 – August 17, 2003 – Sunday
Home in Atlanta. The final segment of the trip — Hawaii — will be August 20 to August 25.
We spent the day organizing information for the book and updating the website. We began collecting our thoughts about Pie today. See the Pie Report and the Pie Ratings.
We went over to visit Madison and her Mommy and Daddy this afternoon. Daddy Robert went wild at a toy store and bought Maddie all kinds of exciting new older girl toys.
One of the best things about traveling for the last five months was ignoring the newspapers, radio, and TV. It is so pleasant when you aren’t hearing all the bad news and the ridiculous politics that cause the Democrats to take positions directly opposite that of the Republicans and to say ridiculous things. It is amazing to me that the two-party system works, and it is so sad that just about everything has to be partisan.
Tonight I learned that 5.6 million living adult Americans have been in prison. That’s one in every 37 adults in the United States. If 2001 incarceration rates remain the same, about 6.6 percent of the people born in 2001 can expect to serve a prison sentence during their lifetimes. This compares with 5.2 percent of those born in 1991 and 1.9 percent of people born in 1974, according to the estimates in the study conducted by the United States Justice Department. These numbers do not even include those jailed — just those who went to a prison. How outrageous is this! As wonderful as our country is, we have real problems. I sincerely believe that we need strong gun control. When our forefathers said we should have the right to keep and bear arms, they had no idea that 7 percent of the children born the year Madison was born would grow up and go to prison.
The Daily Journal of Round America:
Each day, we collect our thoughts on a web page just like this. We drop in some of the photos from the day. Our goal with the Daily Journal is to write about the towns we visit, the sights we see, the people we meet, and the pie we eat. We write about where we are, where we’ve been, and where we are going, but we also make observations about what we’ve seen and done as well as about life in general.
You can follow our travels from the Daily Journal section of this website. Other pages of interest include the running report of “vital statistics” on the Trip Scorecard, our nominations for the Best & Worst of the trip, as well as a rating of the pie we eat. If you’d like to see information for a specific state or town, click here, and then click on the state of interest, and the full itinerary is shown.
Home in Atlanta