We drove up early Wednesday morning and came home Friday morning, it's about a nine hour drive from where we live, so like I said a very short trip. We were really just able to skim the surface but we managed to hit a lot of the neighborhoods and get a quick look at some of the things we had heard were worth seeing in the area.
After checking into the hotel and cooling off for a few minutes (did I mention we drove the nine hours in my un-air conditioned car, yeah you read that right, no a/c...in the south...in the middle of summer..yuck.) we headed out to find the Atlanta Beltline, specifically we ended up at the Eastside Trail in Virginia Highlands by Monroe Drive. We only ended up walking a short ways down the trail since it was pretty darn hot and we still wanted to drive around some more and see a few more neighborhoods before we called it a day.
After some walking around the beautiful Virginia Highlands neighborhood and driving around Downtown, Midtown, and Decatur we ended our day by heading north towards Buford Highway, which we were told was something of a veritable mecca for delectable international foods of all kinds, and it did not disappoint.
On our second and only full day of the trip we decided to start it off with some coffee from Joe's coffee shop in the East Atlanta Village, which also gave us a chance to get a look around the neighborhood. Once were properly caffeinated we headed out on the road towards downtown to visit the school and turn in my paper work, but on the way we made a bit of a pit stop when we happened upon the magical and historical Oakland Cemetery.
We didn't even begin to scratch the surface on it's huge 48 acres but we will definitely be back again once I move. You've really got to love a city that turns a cemetery into a beautiful city park.
Once we made it downtown and got business taken care of at the school we decided to walk around the city and sight see a little, we are small town girls after all and just being in the presence of tall buildings is enough to get us excited.
I realize I could have taken way more pictures of the trip overall but my memory was getting low and I was getting wrapped up in trying to take everything in...plus no one wants to look like a shoobie on their first trip to the city.
While downtown we walked through Centennial Olympic Park where a guy was on stage playing a very lovely acoustic version of John Legend's "All of Me" and kids played in the fountain splash pad to keep cool from the summer heat. We also decided to stop for lunch in a 24 hour diner whose name I can't recall, all I know is they had a fantastically amazing caprese salad with possibly the best mozzarella cheese I've ever had in my life. And once I find out what it is called I will surely edit this to reflect that.
After refreshing with lunch we headed back to the car (which was street parked...say what?!? First time street parking in my life!) and headed over to the funky little neighborhood of Little Five Points, where we walked around in the rain before heading over to the Atlantic Station area where I may or may not have been drawn into Ikea for a quick run through. From which we headed north into the fancy pants Buckhead area where my sad little Florida car gawked and whined at the large sized hills and big fancy houses. (Okay, I'll admit it we were a little excited about the hills too.) We then headed back to our hotel via the slightly shadier west side of Atlanta.
On the third day we kissed the city good bye and headed south in the morning, but we couldn't leave the state without doing the thing the billboards had been urging us to do from the moment we crossed the boarder: to try some of those sweet and juicy Georgia Peaches they love to advertise so much. So we did. But of course we couldn't just stop in at the local grocery store and pick up a bag, no, we had to do the most Georgia-y thing possible and stop in at a U-pick Peach Orchard to pick some of our own straight from the branch. So we stopped at Gardner Farm in Locust Grove, GA on the second to last day of public peach picking and got ourselves a whole five gallon bucket full of Georgia Peaches.
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