Georgia On My Mind

I love Georgia. When I was in my last year in college, my parents decided to move to a small town in Georgia called Duluth. It's about 40 minutes from Atlanta downtown, and it is small but quite a nice place.

My parents actually lived in even a smaller city named "Berkeley Lake," which was actually seceded from Duluth because the people who lived near Berkeley Lake were snobby and wanted to be "different." I do find this whole thing comical and snobbish, but I can KIND OF understand why they wanted to preserve their "difference" away from the general Duluth area.

It's beautiful in Berkeley Lake. And although most of Duluth is now taken over by Korean immigrants and their huge businesses, I still love the Old Town/City Hall area.  So many small artsy, crafty shops and consignment shops, including a KNITTING SHOP. I didn't really knit that much when I lived in Duluth so I wouldn't have known about this cute little shop, Rare Purls.

My husband and I flew red eye to ATL on Thursday night and arrived at 5 AM local time in ATL. We rented a small Corolla and drove straight to Cracker Barrel in Norcross.

And after a huge breakfast, I took the wheel, I got lost, and my husband fell asleep. After an hour of driving around in the dark, I finally found my way back to Duluth. :P

I drove around my old home, and woke up my husband who instantly fell in love with all the trees and changing leaves and cold weather. We walked around the Old Town area for a while but nothing was open (EVEN THE KNITTING SHOP WAS CLOSED)

I'm kind of surprised but I didn't actually feel like checking out any yarn shop while I was there. I was busy checking out the city, the way I have never done before. When I lived there, I did all the basic stuff, like going to the CNN building, the Olympic Park, and World of Coca-Cola... But this time I was able to walk around the city, like a real tourist. At some point, my husband and I ended up in a slum and it was truly truly the scariest 15 minutes of our lives, but we laughed about it later.

 The Government Walk was worth it. My husband and I are real nerds and we like old architecture and courthouses (we ARE lawyers...). It was just scarier because it was a Saturday and NOTHING was open for business, and the streets were pretty much empty except for... loiterers.

We stayed at Ellis Hotel in the heart of Downtown. We got a great deal on Groupon, so we even had a ticket to free meals and margaritas (so sad we didn't get to use it because we were so full all the time).

The room is on the smallish side but it's in Downtown so that was expected. The staff was great, and ambiance was great, but the rooms are NOT soundproof. Luckily we didn't have any uncomfortable situation, but in the evenings, I could literally hear the neighbor's conversation.

I took this photo of Ellis Hotel right when we were leaving the town for the airport. The location is really convenient, it's near many restaurants, like this one we went to:

We had a marvelous time at Juke Joint, and really really enjoyed our stay in Atlanta in general. My husband is in LOVE with Duluth and Berkeley Lake.