To Cooler Climes

Today rose warm and hazy and it was time to continue on. Allatoona Lake just seemed hemmed in by Atlanta and too suburban. Wompatuck in Hingham seems more rural than McKinney. We wanted to ride the Brasstown Bald Scenic Byway at the southern end of the Appalachians in north Georgia, so we headed north. After a wrong turn out of the campground and a detour through another dicey neighborhood (the "Beware of the Dog" and the pitbulls in the yard were a bit disconcerting), we drove east and then north on I-575 to Canton, finally escaping the Atlanta suburbs, then northeasterly on secondary roads through Cleveland to the "City"of Helen.


Helen is at the southern end of the Chattahoochee National Forest, nearly at the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River, which terminates at Lake Seminole. We pretty much followed the path of the Chattahoochee River from Lake Seminole, through Atlanta, to Helen. Helen is a strange town. It has been built to look like a Bavarian Alpine village. It was just a logging town until 1969, when it was converted to an "Alpine" tourist destination. Aside from stopping at the visitor center to pick up some brochures and maps, we haven't explored it yet, nor found out why it mad this radical conversion.

We considered two possibilities for camping nearby, the Unicoi State Park ($28/night) or Andrew's Knob Campground ($6/night) in the National Forest. We headed for Andrew's Knob, seven miles up the scenic byway road. The NFS web site indicated that it opened March 19th, but when we arrived, it was still closed. At this point, we were on a narrow twisty mountain road with no way to turn around with the trailer. The only way to go was up. It got steeper and twistier but finally we reached a parking area where the road crossed the Appalachian Trail. Finally, we could turn around, creep back down the road and on to the state park.

Unicoi State Park is quite nice. It has a large lodge, cabins and a 80+ site campground—and 10 degrees cooler than Atlanta. We took a site on a hillside, in open woods, not far from the park's lake, created by a dam on Smith's Creek. After a good lunch, it was off to take a walk in the woods, the trail around the lake. We are hoping for a cool evening and a good day for a ride tomorrow.