We made it to Georgia!!! It’s taken 3 weeks but we always take it slowly, travel days have always been about 3 hours.

We deliberately made an effort to arrive and drive through downtown Atlanta on a Sunday morning when traffic would be light, if it ever is. So the day before we drove into Douglasville and the Mt Carmel Baptist Church, another Harvest Host. Churches are becoming more prevalent in the HH membership, and why not, they have so much private parking, why not open it up to travelers like us during the week and get donations for an overnight stay.

We had a very uneventful evening, made our donation to the church and left ready to tackle Atlanta

We arrived without issue, parked and took note of the upcoming service to make sure we out of there before the congregation arrived

When we got to Atlanta the traffic wasn’t bad.it was Sunday, Fathers Day, so lighter than usual. Already, driving north on I-85 we saw changes in the landscape, but weren’t quite prepared to be lost in a neighborhood we’d spent 30 years living in.

The only blue sky day we had was day 1. Lovely site , we’d stayed here before when we still had a house and we were refinishing the floors.

The reason we were back in Georgia was  to clear out our storage unit, which we’ve been paying for for 5 years

Doesn’t look like much, but we had 3 big plastic bins with the books and photo albums.

All books, photo albums, art and knick knacks etc…Now where are we going to put everything. The contents were mainly Chris’s and the items she couldn’t part with when we left, so had to put herself through that ordeal again. Fifty more books had to finally be donated as well as knick-knacks. We did manage to de-frame some of the paintings and place them in tubes.

So now it’s all done we made room for 2 elephants, a donkey and a rabbit who will live in her T-shirt drawer. Also salvaged a coffee table built by Chris’s parents’ best man as a wedding gift and had shipped to the US when they passed away.

We had lunch with Ellery, our contractor and now friend. Then it was time for hair cuts with our old hairdresser Misty at Belle La Vie Salon. Haven’t had a decent haircut since we left.

From there we drove to our old neighborhood where we visited our previous neighbor, Sandy and her son Ben.
Then, by invitation of course, we popped over to our old house and were given a tour.. We looked out at the garden and saw something that we’d never saw in 20 + years, an armadillo. Apparently there are at least four of them, plus an assortment of other wildlife who didn’t approach while our dogs were in residence.

After 3 days we had to move to another site. Trying to park a 40’ coach in Atlanta isn’t easy as campgrounds fill up quickly in the summer, and weekends are impossible to book, plus two other ACOE were closed due to lack of staffing, so we had to make do with a Sunday through Thursday stay. 

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We dined out at a couple of old favorite haunts, our first endeavor into Vietnamese cuisine was back in Duluth GA 15 + years ago. Still the best we have found so far. 

Good old C1…it was just as delicious as we remembered.

We went to the Flowery Branch downtown farmers market and bought a few goodies

Then Freddie Falcon, the Falcons mascot showed up. Their training camp is in Flowery Branch.

He scared the bejesus out of this little girl. She was crying after this encounter.

Kids and horses just down the road of the campground entrance.

We really wanted to visit other neighborhoods while there, but the traffic was so bad it put us off, and not just the traffic, we got the feeling that construction in the Atlanta area wouldn’t stop until every tree had been felled.

One thing we noticed was how youthful and professional the local population was, quite different from the AZ 55+ communities we’re used to.

We’d like to have stayed longer as there were more people we wanted to visit with, but we had to move on.