Back from Athens

We decided to visit Athens, GA, for a few days because we'd heard so much about it since moving to the state. It's well-known for the University of Georgia (football, especially), for its music scene, and supposedly for its trendy downtown atmosphere. I say supposedly because it was not quite what I expected after hearing so much.

We stayed in a nice B&B just south of Athens, in a small little town called Watkinsville. The house was an old Victorian lived in by a large southern family and passed around in the family before being sold off to become this inn. The grounds are lovely; there's a pool with a fountain and several acres of gardens, though, since it's March, not much was in bloom. We stayed in the Asian room, called this because it was decorated with antiques from Japan, collected when one of the owners lived there.

The B&B wasn't too bad overall, but we quickly discovered there just wasn't much to do in Athens. It didn't help that we arrived on Monday, when everything was closed. We spent the day touring UGA, which is quite large, and actually reminds me a lot of the University of Tennessee, ironically, since these two are huge rivals. We ate in a downtown sports bar, where we were the only people in the place. In fact, we noticed that we were often the only people in many of the places we went, so to be fair, maybe we just didn't see the "good" part of Athens?

On our second day we went to the Georgia Museum of Art, which was very nice. I really enjoyed their exhibition of devotional prints, many of which were from the early Northern Renaissance. We went back to the downtown area afterwards for coffee and some shopping and managed to find a little bookstore tucked away on a side street. I found a reprint of Lewis Carroll's manuscript for Alice's Adventures Underground (the original version of what later became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) and a 1960s print of George MacDonald's The Golden Key. Nice additions to my little library, and the hour or so I spent in the shop were probably some of the best of the trip. We ended the night with dinner at a small Italian place back in Watkinsville.

Overall, it sounds like a nice trip, but we honestly spend a lot of time just wondering what we could do or see, as there really wasn't much there. In the end, I feel it was worthwhile, mainly because it forced us to relax. Jym and I both get addicted to working (painting for him, writing for me), and we rarely take breaks (he's in his studio now painting, and it's nearly 11 p.m.). So being off somewhere with nothing to do was probably what we both needed; I do feel incredibly refreshed today and wrote four new pages of my latest dissertation chapter. I guess it was time for a break.