Food Feature: Where’s Rudolph?

Look for Eric Rudolph on your summer vacation

Consider the vacation: part logistical forced march, part exercise in family dysfunction and always, but always, too damned expensive.

We offer you an escape from that web of horrors with a getaway that whisks you through the Deep South/New South, has enough edge to chill the bickering among the young ‘uns, aerates the mind and lungs in the rugged Southern Appalachians, and gives your family the chance to win $1 million.

Yes. $1,000,000!

That’s what the FBI will cough up for information leading directly to the arrest of Eric Robert Rudolph, the one-time Murphy resident from the North Carolina mountains suspected of the bombing at the 1966 Atlanta Summer Olympics as well as two other bombings in Atlanta and one in Birmingham, Ala. Tote it up: two dead, more than 100 injured.

Grisly? Sure.

So get on the Run for Rudolph, one of the nation’s Ten Most Wanted. Because hundreds of the nation’s best lawmen have sniffed his non-trail to no avail since 1998, chances are you and your car of junior bloodhounds won’t flush the former 101st Airborne private trained in wilderness survival either. But if you do? Hey. A cool million and 15 seconds of television fame.

First you’ll need to drive to Birmingham, Ala., and find the New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic. This is where Robert Sanderson, an off-duty policeman, was killed by a bomb the FBI believes Rudolph set Jan. 29, 1998. The nondescript office building Rudolph is charged with bombing isn’t pretty. Don’t spend any time gawking at it.

Move on and luxuriate in Birmingham’s history. Check out the 16th Street Baptist Church where in April 1963 the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put school children in the streets to march for civil rights. Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor retaliated, and the world was treated to dogs ripping into marchers, cops flailing billy clubs and school children being washed under cars by high-pressure water hoses.

You really can breathe the history in this town of 915,077, formerly known as the Pittsburgh of the South, which it isn’t anymore. The steel industry went in the hurt locker in the 1970s, the air turned clean and the economy diversified.

Now set your OnStar for Atlanta, where the traffic is worth a Mach 4 headache. Just getting into and out of the 4.1-million metropolitan area makes Dale Earnhardt’s driving habits understandable. (God bless The Intimidator). Chill out with a relaxing walk in downtown Atlanta’s Centennial Park. Here, during the 1996 Summer Olympics, a bomb allegedly set by Rudolph killed one woman and injured hundreds. The park is green and has benches and a view of Atlanta’s sparkling New South skyline.

Before you leave, view Rudolph’s work as an equal opportunity bomber. He is charged with the February 1997 double bombing of The Otherside Lounge, an Atlanta gay nightspot. Rudolph swings all ways. He’s a wilderness survivalist and an urban bomber, who works the suburbs, too, apparently. He is also charged with the January 1997 double bombing of an abortion clinic in the Sandy Springs Professional Building in north Atlanta.

If images of carnage — not to mention the traffic and humidity — in Birmingham and Atlanta leave your nerves a bit raw, drive two hours northwest to Andrews, high in the North Carolina mountains. The 5-foot, 11-inch blue-eyed, brown-haired carpenter first went into the woods around Andrews shortly after the January 1998 abortion clinic bombing in Birmingham. He resurfaced in Andrews for several hours in July of the same year to snag 30 pounds of oat bran from the Better Way health food store and steal a pickup truck. Since then, dogs, helicopters, bear and deer hunters and hundreds of lawmen slogging through the mountains have not unearthed Rudolph from what he told a friend was “a good hiding place.”

Rudolph is, or was, thought to be somewhere out in the 92,363 rugged acres of Nantahala National Forest, where you and your family can tramp for hours, for days, for all eternity. Food costs will be low because you’ll have to carry the granola, cheese and bread you eat. Nobody can argue over the television channel. The view of the stars is great, with authentic mountain laurel, real crashing streams and itty, bitty biting bugs.

And there might, just might, be $1 million at the end of that next mossy, green mountain brook.??






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