These High, Green Hills

I stole this title from the third book in Jan Karon's Mitford series. Great books. If you've never read them, I highly recommend that you do. But that's not what this blog post is about. It just reminded me of the trip Jerry and I took to the north Georgia mountains a couple of weeks ago. North Georgia also has some high, green hills. This picture was taken from the window of our room at the Amicalola Falls State Park Lodge where we really enjoyed staying for 3 days and 2 nights.

Amicalola boasts the highest falls east of the Mississippi River. The park is nice and we hiked around and saw the falls from the top, the middle, and the bottom. This picture was taken in the middle of it. They also have a good restaurant at the lodge where we had dinner one night and two breakfasts. The dining room has one wall of windows that look out over those high, green hills. The first night there, it rained and blew and there was lots of lightning and thunder. The windows opened, so it was great sleeping!! We treated ourselves to this little trip to celebrate our anniversary. We stopped and played golf on the way up there and went to a neat place for lunch.

When we checked in at the lodge, they asked if we were celebrating our anniversary. We said, "Yes", and looked at each other wondering how they knew. We hadn't mentioned it when we made the reservations. Walking down the hall to our room, we decided we must just look like a couple of old, married people. But when we opened the door to our room, we figured it out. There was a wonderful surprise waiting for us! The kids had arranged to have a fabulous fruit, cheese, cracker tray and a bottle of bubbly set up for us. Such great kids we have! It was as delicious as it looks.

We spent the evenings at the lodge and the days in the small mountain towns in the area. One of those towns is Dahlonega. That's where the nation's first major gold rush took place in 1828...a full 20 years before the "49ers" went to California. There are lots of shops, restaurants, wine tasting, etc. around the old town square.

Another neat town is Helen...also known as Alpine Helen. Seems this little town nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the Chattahoochee River was struggling some years back. So to bring life to the town, the people wisely decided to redo the whole town with the look of an Alpine Village. All the buildings...even gas stations and fast food places...have to have that look. And it works. More shopping, etc. And there are many eating places that have patios that overlook the river so you can sit there in the summer time and watch people going by on brightly colored inner tubes that are for rent just north of the town.

What a fun, relaxing couple of days we had. It was only a couple of hours from home, but seemed like another world. Silly that we wait and use an anniversary as an "excuse" to do these things. We really should get out more!!