King of the Mountain

Sunday, April 3, 2011

For our last week in Georgia, we headed up to Stone Mountain Park in Atlanta. Stone Mountain is the largest exposed piece of Granite in the world. Only one percent of the mountain is actually visible with the remaining 99% under ground. For our first activity at the park, we headed up the gondola to see the top of the mountain. It's pretty unreal to see only rock and a few struggling plants on the top. With the wind chill, we didn't last very long up there and headed back down after 40 minutes or so.


Next we headed over to the adventure portion of our day. They had a climbing/obstacle course with various ropes and boards to balance on. Katie was a pro, and with the harness on, her fear of heights seemed to vanish. The highest part was three stories high and was still a little unnerving even with the harness.


After our high adventure, we headed over to a history plantation in the park. The plantation had several different areas representing different time periods.


After our fun day at the park, we headed over to Dantes down the Hatch jazz and fondue restaurant. The restaurant was decorated like a ship and old English town. The food was okay, but the atmosphere was really enjoyable.

Feeling like Spring

For our third week in Georgia, we wanted to see more of the local culture and area that we are living by. We began our exploration in Milledgeville GA. Milledgeville is the closest town to where we are staying. It was the first capital of Georgia until it was moved later to Atlanta. Our first stop in Milledgeville was Lockerly Hall. This home was a larger plantation that was built in 1839. It is one of the few homes that have been preserved in Milledgeville. Many of the homes were burnt in the civil war. It is said to be haunted, but we didn't run into any ghosts on our visit.



The next stop was the old Capital building. The building looks like a castle and we had hoped to go up into it, but unfortunately it is only open on the trolley tour and the trolley was broken when we went for it. Even though the upper building tour didn't happen, we did get to see a larger museum with civil war information and artifacts.


After we had visited those two places, we headed over to Macon Georgia to see the Cherry Blossom festival and to visit the Hay House. While we were looking around the town in Macon, we came across one of the older churches in the area and took some of these inspiring shots.


The Hay house was very nice looking. It was designed to look like an Italian mansion. To save money they painted many of the walls to look like wood or like marble. It was some of the best facade painting I have seen in a home. I kept thinking that the walls were carved out marble, or the walls detailed wood, but it turned out to be painting most of the time. We weren't able to take pictures inside, but here is what we did get. If you ever go to Georgia, I recommend you visit this house.


After spending our time in Macon, we headed outside of the town to see a local festival, the Cherry Blossom Festival. It was a local gathering much like heritage days in Utah. It is beautiful to see the plants flowering everywhere in Georgia at this time. One of the coolest things we saw was the hot air balloons at the Cherry Blossom Festival. They didn't take off, but instead lit up like giant Christmas lights. That was the end of our day, we experienced a little bit of the local culture, the events, and really enjoyed it.