I have the cutest darn granddaughter in the whole wide world. There is no doubt about it, and no force in the universe that can convince me otherwise. Trouble is, she lives in Georgia, and I live in Utah. What's a grandpa to do?
While I was mulling over various options, including getting my granddaughter's parents to FedEx her to me, my smarter half, the newly minted grandma, was already buying airplane tickets. I suppose that saved me a lot of walking, but those suckers are expensive!
On the bright side, flying an airplane gave me a new perspective on things Not only did I get to admire Utah's Canyonlands from above, but Kyauna had come to Utah with her mom, a surprise visit that was arranged bare seconds after the credit card charge for the airplane tickets cleared, and now she was going back to Georgia, so we could visit her. Trust me, it made sense at the time. In any case, how else would I have had the opportunity to hold my granddaughter sleeping in my arms from Dallas to Atlanta?
Salt Lake City is no small town, but compared to Atlanta it's a burg, a backwater, the sticks, a laughable collection of wannabe skyscrapers and public works projects built to line the pockets of a few wealthy robber barons. Atlanta is all that too, of course, only 10 times as much. Between spending time admiring my granddaughter, my wife and I spent the next week discovering what this difference means.
We stayed in Lawrenceville, a small town that once used to be a nice rural community, with a Baptist Church, and a Ladies' Seminary now turned museum. There wasn't much inside the museum. I suspect Georgia's warm and humid climate. Like just about anyplace in the old South, there was a Civil War Memorial in Lawrenceville, which grandma as a distant relative of John Brown himself had to pose by. It was raining that day.
Later, when it cleared up, my wife wanted to check out Gwinnett County's Unitarian-Universalist church. We found them in a steel barn, down the street from a gorgeous Congregationalist church in a New England Colonial style.
These days all small towns like Lawrenceville are surrounded by a warren of suburbian sprawl. If there is any planning going on, it must go no further than, "How can I make some more money?" The sprawl is effectively destroying the small communities, which are losing their older town centers to sterile strip malls and shopping centers. A common story in the USA, but sad to see at this extreme.
Just north of Lawrenceville is Lake Lanier, a manmade lake that is the target of half of Georgia's population on weekends. When we visited the lake, it was the middle of the week, and relatively quiet. (That's Elysa, and Kyauna's parents, Tieya and Devan.) There were sailboats and motorboats on the lake, and people pushing baby carriages along walking paths that surround the lake.
On Wednesday Devan got us tickets to see the Braves kick some Mets butt. We descended on Atlanta with plenty of time to avoid most of the pre-game traffic jam, and walked around a bit to admire the old capitol. It is surrounded by memorials from a variety of wars, and Devan and I posed alongside one that consisted of a huge cannon. Nearby the old town has been sanitized for the 1996 Olympic games. I doubt that Sherman did nearly as much damage as Atlanta's Olympic Committee did 130 years later. Across the street from the capitol was an old church looking like a refugee from a medieval European village.
The Braves play in Turner Stadium, a huge structure where some of the 1996 Olympic venues were held. Not only is the ugliest Olympic torch tower I've ever seen right by the stadium, but once we got to our seats in the nose bleed section, we had a gorgeous view of Atlanta's skyline while the Sun was setting. Helped by our cheering, the Braves won, of course.
One of the biggest disappointments of Georgia was the food. There are plenty of restaurants, but we found few that serve the kind of cooking that Georgia is supposed to be famous for. Instead, at just about every intersection there is a "Waffle House." After eating there once, we took to calling it "Awful House." Even the Gwinnett County Fair sported only a miserable selection of vegetables and no actual cooking worth mentioning. We did like the boiled peanuts, though.
By Thursday, Elysa was desperate for "something green." When you're on a diabetic diet, being faced with waffles and grits isn't a prospect you look forward to. So we decided to visit the country. There we found vegetable stands by the roadside about every other mile. First they advertised "Apples!" then "Apples and Peaches!" then "Apples, Peaches, and Potatos!" When we got to an Amish house that offered "Apples, Peaches, Potatos, Sweet Potatos, and Okra!" we stopped and loaded up. That evening, we cooked a proper meal!
To the Northwest of Lawrenceville, about three hours of freeway driving away, is Helen, a tourist trap that once started out as an honest Georgian town. These days it has transformed itself into a fake German village and goes by "Alpine Helen." While we were there, a busload of German tourists arrived, apparently intent on buying something German while they were in the USA. We bought some fudge, and headed home again.
After a week of Georgia, Elysa and I kissed Kyauna goodbye one last time, and climbed aboard our flight back to Utah. We had had a good time, but we truly felt like we were coming home.
