That Time We Camped in Georgia
We try to do too much in Atlanta during our 2021 summer vacation
In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way.
Our summer vacation in 2021 couldn’t have come at a worse time. We had started discussing our plans in late 2020, as my sister-in-law started making her own plans for a camping sabbatical across the United States. By the time she was ready to make the itinerary in early 2021, our lives had exploded in our laps. We made the decision to move back to Indiana less than two weeks before we were supposed to leave on vacation. In short, it was a disaster, and with focus on moving when we returned, all I could really write about it was a quick summary. Now that I have time, I’m going back to write more reflectively about each of our major stops. You can find the original summary of our whole vacation here.
For the entire time that we lived in Texas, camping in Georgia had been one of my goals. Not only did we have a camping map that “needed” to be filled out, but I had started following enough camping accounts that I knew there were a lot of beautiful spots throughout the state. I had also wanted to finally visit the Martin Luther King Jr. sites in the city, both to fulfill my historical curiosity and to finally get those Georgia stamps in our National Parks Passports.
Our three-night stop in Georgia was kind of successful.
Unlike most of my other vacation planning, our 2021 summer vacation was scheduled, but not planned. We knew where we were staying each night and I had a vague idea of what I personally wanted to do while we were in each stop, but there was little preparation beyond that. I made assumptions about our Atlanta stop based on life in Texas, only to discover that quite a bit of Atlanta was still taking a lot of solid COVID-19 precautions. These restrictions complicated my goals (because if we’re being honest, I couldn’t really call them plans) of visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park and Centennial Olympic Park.
On the day designated for Atlanta explorations, we woke up later than usual due to exhaustion from the week before. When we arrived in Atlanta, we discovered that Centennial Olympic Park was not open the day we were there and the only building open in MLK Jr. NHP was the gift shop.
So much for spending several hours walking in the footsteps of giants.
But with the help of park rangers, we were still able to walk around the memorials and see the grave of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. We took pictures of the outside of Ebenezer Baptist Church and the front and back of King’s childhood home. We visited the gift shop and walked past small row houses that took us back into time and highlighted how far we still have to go as a country. While it wasn’t the full experience we were hoping for, we still walked in some of the footsteps of historical giants.
We stopped for a late lunch at a local restaurant. Then my sister-in-law took the kids for a couple of hours of Atlanta exploration. After some fun, they discovered the College Football Hall of Fame…an hour after it closed. With a family vacation that took our kids away from friends a month before we were moving them back across the country, we were looking for every win that we could find. This would have certainly been a win for our son.
Jeff decided that he would take our son back into the city the next day with his parents along for the ride. I decided to hang back with my sister-in-law and daughter and take a hike in the state park to take advantage of the cooler than usual summer temperatures.
We had a much better time than the other half of our family.
While my husband had checked the website for times the Hall of Fame was open, he misinterpreted the one day a week it was closed, making the mistaken assumption that it was closed on Sundays. That means he drove our son and his parents into Atlanta (by this point we had learned this was really a 75-minute drive from Chattahoochee Bend State Park with at least 30 of those minutes on windy country roads) only to discover that Tuesday, not Sunday, was the one day a week it was closed.
We had a long discussion about what to do when they returned to our campsite. In order to appease our twice devastated 10-year-old, we sent the rest of the crew on to South Carolina the next day while Jeff and I spent five hours driving to Atlanta, exploring the Hall of Fame, and driving back to the state park, only to have to still pack up the camper and travel another six hours to our next stop, arriving well after dark. And while it definitely contributed to way more driving than we had originally anticipated, it was a delightful two-hour excursion that helped to distract our son from the reality of our looming move.
Our stop in Georgia was not a dream fulfillment by any measure, but we still walked away with a few positive memories before heading to our next stop. It wasn’t enough to take away the sting of moving, but it distracted us for a little while.
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I love that distinction, organized but not planned.