Athens, GA & Chattanooga, TN

Greetings!

Welcome to my second travel blog! My first was about stopping at The Museum of Wonder on the way to Athens, GA. I’m traveling with my girlfriend Mallory, who is an awesome keynote speaker and writer.

In case you missed my previous blogs, here’s the quick version: Mallory and I are currently staying just north of Gulfport, Mississippi. We were living in New Orleans when lightning caught our apartment building on fire, and we since we lost most of our things and no longer have rent, we decided to venture out to other cities and eventually find a new place to call home. And we’re using Mississippi as our home base as we do so.

Athens, GA

We really liked Athens — a small college city full of rolling hills, cute houses, and trees everywhere. There is nature everywhere, and there are so many walking trails through swatches of foresty parks. Tons of bands come from Athens, including R.E.M. and The B52s.

Over the course of the four days we stayed in Athens, we kept finding more reasons to like it. There are quirky shops, coffee shops, and restaurants all over the place - antique shops, comic stores, and gaming stores. While checking out a gaming shop (board games and role-playing games), we realized that they are a great resource for us while checking out a city. Most have tables set up where people play Dungeons & Dragons, other role-playing games, or board games, and joining gaming groups would be a great way to make friends in a new place. The staff in the Athens gaming shops were particularly friendly and inviting.

State Botanical Garden of Georgia

After living in New Orleans for 15 years, driving outside a city and seeing forests instead of swamps is a pretty cool experience. It’s in the midst of these forests that you find the State Botanical Garden. The New Orleans botanical garden is really nice, but the one in Athens is another world - it’s huge, reminding me more of a nature park than a botanical garden. There were butterflies everywhere, giant playgrounds for kids, and plants from all over the world — all in the middle of a forest.

The first thing we saw were hundreds of flowers covered in these yellow and black butterflies.

And here are some pics from the rest of the Botanical Garden, including the really cool playground and some groovy snail statues!

Church - An Amazing Dive Bar

One of the last places we checked out in Athens was a downtown bar called Church. We didn’t find it while researching Athens, it was just a place we saw while wandering around downtown. It was late afternoon, we were the only patrons, and the bartender was really nice and talked to us for a while about Athens and the bar itself.

Church feels like a mix of a few different bars in New Orleans, especially bars on Lower Decatur in the French Quarter. It’s a gay bar, a dive, and full of religious paintings that have irreverent things written on them in bubbly letters (which reminded us of the New Orleans artist Dr. Bob’s work). There is also a crazy amount of Pee-wee Herman dolls all over. The artist and owner is named Sister Louisa, and the Church in Athens is actually the second location, the first one being in Atlanta.

Here are some pictures of the bar. (If you’re religious, you may wish to skip this part. The artwork is pretty irreverent)

Chattanooga, TN

So after Athens, we went to Greenville, South Carolina. We really didn’t like Greenville much, so I actually don’t have any pictures. It just wasn’t our kind of city.

Then we visited Chattanooga, Tennesee. Unfortunately, by the time we got to Chattanooga, we were very tired of traveling. We started traveling only weeks after the apartment fire, and we really yearned to just chill out and not have to run around cities for a while.

Even with being exhausted, we did enjoy Chattanooga. Driving in, there was a river full of people white water rafting for miles and miles. The city is like Athens in that it is full of walking trails and nature. We drove all around the city, checking out gaming shops, restaurants, and breweries.

We stayed in a neighborhood called Saint Elmo at the bottom of a mountain called Lookout Mountain, which has a whole neighborhood on top of it. We took an incline railway that pulled us up to the top, where we walked around and looked out over the city. It was so beautiful! Since we were so tired, I didn’t get many pictures of the city, but here are some pictures of the view from Lookout Mountain as well as a video of the ride up: