Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Breakfast with Candidate Trump

Last week, I ate breakfast with Donald Trump.

I was in a hotel near Athens, Ga., eating uniformly shaped western mini omelets along with bagels I'd toasted myself, and The Donald was on the flat screen, talking about something very, very important.

Not a lightweight, this guy. Not a dummy. Not a loser.

(I just checked his Twitter account, and he's at 66.6 million followers. At least there's a decimal point in there.)

I say I was eating breakfast with Trump because somebody had turned the TV up really, really loud so you had no choice but to hear everything the Republican front-runner said.

The guys at the table next to me were in town for a dirt bike racing tournament. "You've got to hand it to Trump," one of them said. "At least he doesn't have to ask anybody for money."

The dirt bike racer shook his head, as if it were a strain for him to compliment Trump, as if he might even be voting for Hillary. That was highly unlikely.

But this morning nobody had to vote for anybody or admit anything. We just chewed our food and tried to figure out how one man's skin could get that orange.

It was not a tasty breakfast. At one point, somebody asked the breakfast lady if she had made the French toast sticks herself, and the breakfast lady said, "I did the last part."

A smooth answer, I thought.

Perhaps someone had cut actual French bread into strips and the breakfast lady had taken over and lovingly dipped them in batter and gently fried them in a skillet.

Or she had taken the French toast sticks out of a box and defrosted them in a microwave. Yes.

I was glad when breakfast was over. I was glad to get away from politics, and to get back on the road.

I was driving to a high school baseball game in Valdosta, where Trump would make headlines a few days later when a group of black students was removed from his audience.

But I wasn't thinking about any of the presidential candidates. When I got on I-75 in Macon, I turned off the radio and listened to tires humming on the road.

The little towns sailed by. There was Byron, in Peach County, and an empty peach stand that actually misspelled the word "peaches," then Perry, home of the Georgia National Fair.

Then Unadilla, home of Myron Mixon, star of the reality TV show "BBQ Pitmasters." Then Cordele, the watermelon capital of the world.

Then Ashburn, home of Carroll's Country Store, which is actually a kind of outlet store for Carroll's Sausage.

A sausage outlet store?

Ain't Georgia great!

And all along the way, there were billboard messages from Jesus. He was telling motorists that it wasn't too late.

On one billboard, Jesus was helping soldiers.

On another, Jesus was turning bloody zombies back into living, happy people.

That was just one morning in America, where it's getting more interesting every day.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 9:05 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Breakfast with Candidate Trump ."