Tag: travel

When it comes to milestones, it’s hard to beat Florida’s 500th anniversary, commemorating the arrival of Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon on the state’s east coast near present-day St. Augustine.

Interested in pitching a tent, battling the elements, and using the great outdoors as a bathroom? Me neither. For those of us who appreciate Mother Nature but prefer a few creature comforts, hooray for the Martyn House.

From the sunset side of Interstate 75 to the Alabama border, you won’t spot a municipality themed to an Alpine village or wine trails with slick marketing campaigns.

I grew up in South Georgia, which, at fifteen, was hard to think of as a tourist attraction. My neck of the woods seemed like a place you’d travel through, not to. “It’s a land of red clay and despair,” I recall churlishly telling a college friend.

Brooke Hatfield’s route took her past Sweet Grass Dairy and White Oak Pastures, but the southwest region is home to some of Georgia’s top-producing counties.

Most towns between Atlanta and Savannah have a Sherman story, though Covington’s is less harrowing than some: His troops looted the town but otherwise left it intact.

A while back, a conspiracy of kindness unfolded like an unassuming flower in my hometown.

It’s been more than thirty years since Knoxville hosted the World’s Fair, and there’s only been one such expo in the United States since (New Orleans in 1984). Yet after its fifteen minutes of international fame, “Knoxpatch” settled back into its easygoing, unpretentious ways.

When my wife, Linda, and I were very young and very poor, we lived in a tin-roofed cabin in Mountain City, Georgia. Sometimes, to love well what we could love for free, we would drive around the lakes of Rabun County and all the green, wrinkled land in that far northeastern part of our state.

Like just about every other sizable body of water in Georgia, Carters Lake is not a lake but a reservoir. It was created thirty-six years ago, when the Coosawattee River—which had been diverted to permit construction of the largest earthen dam east of the Mississippi—slammed into the dam’s embankment.