Helen, Ga

So, I've come about sixty miles averaging between 8 and 12 miles a day. It's my 7th day out and I've decided to take a day off (in trail jargon, that's called a zero day). I met this kid Brad on the trail the other day, and we agreed to split a hotel room in Helen, Ga so we could sleep on beds and nurse our various aches. Last night we got into town, checked into a hotel and found a super-dope Mexican restaurant run by a bunch of dudes from Juarez. It was really good. I got some chicken enchiladas. I ate them.

Now I'm at the Helen Public Library using their internet to write on my blog, check the extended forecast, catch up on boingboing.net, etc.

SO here's the thing with Helen. In the 1960s Helen was pretty much a standard mountain resort town nestled into the Chattahoochee Natl Forest. Problem was, at some point, the tourism industry started floundering things were looking bleak for our fair city. Anyway, the village elders (or something) got together and hired a german artist/architect to come up with some way to save the town's economy. The result is mindbending. Helen is now a pretty alpine-themed quasi-Bavarian resort town. The entire place, which runs for one mile along highway 76 in NE Georgia, looks like this...





Try as I might, I can't seem to induce any sort cynicism about Helen. It's super weird, but it's charming in its peculiarity and particularity. The people are really really friendly, and the town seems to do very well for itself. People come here for honeymoons, people come here to summer, and people come here en masse to get shitfaced all through October. It's nice to see some sort of forethought in the architectural scheme of a little community,rather than a redundant string of applebees and walmarts. Anyway, go to Helen, take your kids. It's cheap and fun and the Hofer Cafe/Bakery has really good breakfast. I also saw a guy selling painted rocks on the side of the highway. If they didn't weigh about 10 pounds each, I might have bought the paisley one.