June 9-10 Piedmont Park & Sweetwater Creek

Our first week here we worked like crazy to get minimally moved in:

• We unpacked our rooms, the kids,t he living room, the family room, the kitchen and the dining room.
• We pulled all the carpeting in the kids room (it was an allergen haven) and painted the plywood green.
• We repainted the kitchen yellow.

Gamma stayed with us and watched the kids, helped paint, and was generally invaluable in getting stuff done. As soon as she left, our progress slowed down tremendously. We decided we needed to have some fun so we took the weekend off to explore our new home town.

On Saturday morning we took the kids to Piedmont Park. It is a huge park near midtown with a great playground, pond, and a farm market on Saturday mornings.

We started at they playground where the kids had a great time running around and jumping off of anything in site. Nik is a fearless little monkey. He climbs up stuff right after his brother and jumps right off. The kids then rode their scooters around the pond to the Farm Market. The view of downtown from the pond is great...

The farm market made me terribly homesick for Ann Arbor and Carrboro both of which have thriving farm markets where I could do most of my shopping. This farm market has a couple of vendors but mostly crafts and prepared foods and only about a dozen stalls. The live music is fun for the kids but it is more a place to grab a cookie than somewhere to buy produce.

We had an epiphany in Piedmont Park - our family is not complete by Atlanta standards. It seems, in addition to everyone in Atlanta having a sleigh bed (judging from every house we looked at) everyone in Atlanta also owns a dog. Or three.

The next morning we decided to strike out to Sweetwater Creek State Park. It is about 30 minutes out of town (when there is no traffic on Sunday morning). We went there for the arts and crafts show. We arrived as the vendors were finishing setting up. After a quick tour, a visit to the bouncy castle, and some hot dogs we still had energy and had seen the whole fair so we decided to head off on a hike.

We hiked along Sweetwater Creek which starts as a slowly meandering stream and speeds up to a Class 4 whitewater. We hiked the first half of the trail (to the abandoned mill) and looked out on to the whitewater while eating kettle corn (from the fair, of course).

The walk is beautiful and the kids had fun finding schist with garnets in it and pieces of mica. We also saw a HUGE black rat snake -- about 4 feet long and thicker than my wrist in the middle. Very impressive. Ben, who had been racing ahead, stuck to me like a burr after we saw the snake (he had run right by it and didn't see it until I pointed it out).

The kids had such a great time that Nik asks every day when we are leaving to go camping.