On Sunday 19th it was Gold Rush Day in Dahlonega, a huge crafts and music festival, so that provided some excitement. The small city of Dahlonega (population less than 10,000) hosts a quarter of a million visitors over this two-day event. Pamela and Tony went off to explore everything, whilst we took things a little easier. It was rather too crowded for our liking, and much more commercial than the spring music festival in Dahlonega.
We returned home mid-afternoon to relax and have a final chat before the Townshends departed on Monday morning for the next leg of their American road trip, to Nashville. During the evening, it became apparent that Tony has mislaid his camera somewhere in Dahlonega, which was a bit of a downer. However, when the left in the morning, they took a detour into town to see if the camera could be found. Much to their surprise, it had been handed in as lost property at the Visitors Center, and so they were able to reclaim it. There are nice people in Dahlonega, obviously. Tony was disappointed not to have seen any of the deer that wander across our land. And they had hardly disappeared up the rocky driveway when two does emerged from the woods.
After their departure, we had two days to do laundry and tidy up in preparation for our next visitors from UK, Peter and Paula Firstbrook. Peter is on a book launch publicity tour for his latest work A Man Most Driven. Peter was scheduled to round off his tour by speaking at the local university on Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. So Thursday afternoon and evening was given over to an explanation of the lack of any romance between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (which was probably a slight disappointment to a packed lecture hall of enthusiastic history students).
With Peter and Paula, we took the opportunity to do a lot of relaxing – they needed it as much as we did. We did visit a couple of the local wineries, and we did a drive up into the mountains. We stopped for ice creams at the historic Walasi-Yi Interpretive Center. The Appalachian Trail hiking route passes through the building, marking the only covered portion of the trail’s 2100 plus miles – so we walked a few yards along the path and can now claim to have walked part of the Appalachian Trail. No plans to do the whole journey up into Maine, though. The leaves are turning red and yellow, and they make for spectacular views.
Following the departure of Peter and Paula on Sunday afternoon, we have far too many odd jobs on our plate to complete before we disappear off next Thursday for a couple of days in Charleston in South Carolina for a family wedding. And that will not be just a quick service and a buffet in the local hotel – it is full time festivities from Thursday to Saturday (including a fancy-dress ball on Friday evening – I suspect that there will be a number of the Walking Dead present as that is Halloween night!). So no unpacking this week. However, TJ will be preparing the driveway immediately in front of the house for concrete to be poured in our absence. And we need to start talking with Jonathan about a stand-by generator – we have had two power outages of three hours each since we moved into the house. Local friends say that this is not typical, but since the house is all electric for heating and everything else, we are not happy at the thought of this sort of outages in the winter. Jonathan did make all preparations for installing a generator (powered by our propane tank) when he was wiring the house.