Summer weather started late this year, but when it hit, it was with a full, Southern vengeance with killer heat and humidity. This last week, it finally started to cool off. In addition to spending time apple-picking on Saturday, I took advantage of the nice weather and went on a long walk on Sunday afternoon.

Atlanta is known for its festivals. Many neighborhoods such as Inman Park have their own festivals. Others are sponsored by breweries such as Sweetwater 420 Festival or by arts organizations and take place in parks around the city. Of course, there are also music festivals such as Shaky Knees, Shaky Boots, Midtown Music Festival, and others.

We skipped the festivals during the heat of the summer this year, but there were two on Sunday that sounded interesting, both within walking distance of our house. I decided to go to Sweet Auburn Music Fest and made the 25-minute trek on foot to check it out. One of the great things about walking to the festival instead of driving is that I noticed little details that I wouldn’t otherwise see.

The most significant building that I saw along the way was Howard Middle School. This building first opened in 1923 as an elementary school for black children. Martin Luther King, Jr went to school here as a child. In 1948, it became Atlanta’s first black high school. It closed in 1976 and remained vacant until 2021 when it reopened as a neighborhood middle school after an extensive renovation and expansion.

Sweet Auburn is an historic neighborhood that was the first black neighborhood to grow in the city after the Civil War. It became a prosperous black business district and was famous around the country. I’ll make a more detailed post about it at a later date.

The Sweet Auburn Music Fest is an annual urban music festival with performances, food, and arts vendors reflecting black culture in Atlanta. When I arrived, a young girl had just taken the stage. She was about 9 years old, wearing shiny gold pants, and belting out gospel music. A man in front of the stage was dancing and saying to everyone who walked by, “That’s my grandbaby up there! That’s my grandbaby!” He was so proud of her.

The festival was smaller than I had expected, only 3 blocks long. However, there were a few hundred people there. Not surprisingly, I only saw about 9 other white people walking around.

I walked through the festival, looking at things for sale, listening to music. As I left, an older lady had taken the stage with her husband and was signing more gospel music. People were dancing and clapping and singing along. It was fun.

I still had some gas in the tank, so to speak, so I decided to walk over to the Old Fourth Ward Arts Festival, about 25 minutes away. On the way, I again saw some interesting things.

The Old Fourth Ward Arts Festival was pretty small, about 30 vendor tents. There were the usual paintings, watercolors, custom t-shirts, ink drawings, homemade dog toys, candles, body butter, essential oils, knitted things. 

Surprisingly, there was only one food tent which served gyros, and there were zero port-a-potties. The festival was held in Historic Old Fourth Ward Park which is across from Ponce City Market, so I guess people could walk across a street, across a large parking lot, and into a massive building to find a bathroom and food alternatives. After strolling through that festival, I did just that and walked over to Ponce City Market to use the bathroom and then connect to the Beltline for the 30-minute walk home. 

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, so the Beltline was pretty busy. I always enjoy that walk as it passes through different neighborhood zones with businesses, residences, and landscape areas along the way.

When I was about halfway home, I came upon a third festival that wasn’t on my radar. We’re in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, and there was a Hispanic Heritage Festival in a large grassy field next to the Old Fourth Ward skate park. There was a stage with Latin American music that made me want to boogie, lots of food booths, and arts and crafts vendors. It was a nice surprise to take a detour through this festival on my way home.

All in all, I think I set a world record by attending three festivals in one afternoon. I covered 4-1/2 miles over the course of 2-1/2 hours. It was fun to see festivals that I hadn’t seen before, and I got to see and appreciate parts of the city at a pedestrian pace. Would do it again! 14 out of 10!

And just because these flowers brought me so much joy, here they are again:

This weekend we drove up to the North Georgia Mountains to go apple picking. This was our fourth year visiting Red Apple Barn Farm in Ellijay. In fact, we like that orchard so much, we went twice last year.

The farm has 19 varieties of apples, and picking season runs roughly from August 15th to October 30th. The varieties include Gala, Honeycrisp, Ludacrisp, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, September Wonder, Suncrisp, Jonagold, Mutzu, Crimson Crisp, Rome Beauty, Cameo, Pritchett Golden, Stayman Winesap, Granny Smith, Fuji, Pink Lady, Arkansas Black, and Yates. The Ludacrisp variety makes me giggle, because the rapper Ludacris lives in Atlanta.

We got up bright and early, actually before sunrise, so we could leave the house around 7 am, stop for breakfast along the way, and get to the farm at 9 am.

We stopped at Waffle House, a Georgia institution with locations all over the place. In fact, we passed 14 of them on our 1-hour and 20-minute drive to Ellijay. The restaurant’s tag line is “Good Food Fast,” and it serves breakfast all day. I’ll write a separate post about Waffle House at another time. We stopped at a Waffle House in Ellijay, and we were in and out of there in 30 minutes.

We arrived at Red Apple Barn at 9:08, so excited to be one of the first visitors to arrive. Turns out the farm’s store opens at 9 am but the u-pick activity doesn’t start until 10 am. So we decided to drive back into Ellijay and walk around the town square. And I’m glad we did! There was a little farmers market going on, so we bought some chicken eggs, duck eggs, and 4 containers of local honey.

Happy with our unexpected purchases, we went back to Red Apple Barn at 10 am. You pay for admission to the farm, and there’s a selection of bags and baskets that you can buy to fill with apples. Then you catch a tractor ride up to the top of the orchard.

At the top of the hill, the tractor drops you off, and there is a info stand where employees tell you what is ready to pick and where to find the different varieties around the property.

We spent a couple of hours walking around, filling our basket and bags. We would taste-test each variety before deciding if we wanted to pick that particular kind. 

During our first trip to the farm in 2024, we discovered Mutzu apples which are huge, the size of softballs, and which are really crisp and delicious. Both last year and this year the Mutzu were disappointing, so we only brought home three of those.

We were also really looking forward to the Pink Ladies. We could fill a whole bag just with Pink Ladies, but again, we were disappointed this year. Those apples fell into two categories: 1) small, green and not ripe, 2) ripe but blighted with some sort of fungus or insect infestation and rotting on the tree. Boo. I was only able to pick four Pink Ladies.

We did find other varieties to fill our bags including Jonagold, September Wonder, Cameo, Enterprise, and others that I can’t remember.

In addition to apple picking, the farm has two cows and two calves that you can feed. They love to eat apples. There are also a couple of children’s play areas, because so many people come with their little kids, as well as a pumpkin patch, u-pick flowers, and various games like cornhole and horse shoes.

When we were done at the top of the hill, we decided to walk back down through the orchards instead of catching a lift on the tractor.

It was a long but productive day. In the end, we came home with 8 or 9 varieties of apples for a total of 30-35 pounds of fruit. This is not our record haul. Last year, since we made two trips north, we harvested 66 pounds of apples. And now the fun begins as we make dried apple rings, applesauce, baked apples, and rustic apple tart or just pick up an apple and enjoy it as a snack.

Fall has officially started here in Atlanta, and we’ve been blessed with a couple of cooler days this week with highs only in the 70s. But that will change next week when the temps creep back into the 80s. Summer heat keeps hanging around.

With the cooler weather, Chad and I have started going for walks after work again. Today was a long walk down the Beltline, and then we cut back through the neighborhood to come home.

The kids are back in school. In fact, they’ve been in school so long already, since August 3rd, that they are already on fall break this week.

Speaking of school, Chad and I are taking an online Intermediate Italian course this fall through a language school in Boston. Our teacher is native Italian and is a professor at Boston University, so she’s a great fit. Plus, there are only two other students in the class, so we get lots of individual attention. If things go well, I might attempt the citizenship language exam in February. Otherwise, I’ll take it in June. (It’s only offered four times a year. It’s also only offered in a few cities in the US, so I’ll have to travel to take the exam, maybe to Miami, maybe to Boston.)

I’m back at work full time, and it’s so nice to be on a regular schedule again. I’m still doing PT exercises, but my shoulder is 98% healed. I’m guessing a few more weeks of PT to work out the final bits of pain, and then I will be back to normal. I’ve decided, however, that I’m going to continue doing several of these exercises for the rest of my life. They are good for maintaining flexibility and building strength, and it will be good for me to keep this up as I get older.

The farmer’s market is having a bumper crop of late summer / early fall produce, so we have been eating lots and lots of vegetables. I’ve been making gazpacho every week. Yum! And this last weekend I made a big pan of ratatouille which is so healthy and delicious.

Our yard is full, almost overgrown after a long summer, and it’s getting ready for fall.

There are lots of late summer flowers blooming around the neighborhood. I love that things bloom for so many months of the year.

And finally, people are starting to put up Halloween decorations. I don’t have any photos of that to share, yet, but I did spy this fun guy on a walk today. This structure is a holding cell circa 1900, located in a park down the block from my house. Back in the day, a policeman, on foot, could arrest someone for something like public drunkenness and lock them in this little compartment until the paddy wagon came around to pick them up and take them to jail. I call this compartment The Drunk Tank. Here is its visitor today:

I first fell in love with dahlias in 2013. We were on a mini-sabbatical in Paris where we had rented an apartment for five weeks. One day, I saw a poster for a mushroom festival in Parc Floral, and I thought, “I bet Chad would enjoy that.” Parc Floral is in the southeast area of Paris on the edge of the city. The mushroom festival was cool, of course, with specimens on display that had been foraged by amateur mushroom gatherers from around the country. Parc Floral had much more to offer, however, including a bonsai tree collection and an international dahlia competition. The dahlias were planted directly in one area of the park, and I was fascinated with all of the different varieties. Chad went back to the park a second time specifically to photograph these flowers. We now have a large print of one of his photos hanging in our house.

This weekend was the annual Georgia Dahlia Show showcasing hundreds of dahlias grown and cultivated by members of the Dahlia Society of Georgia, and it did not disappoint. What is quite astonishing to me is that dahlias come in a great variety of shapes, sizes and colors. It’s hard to believe that some of these flowers are even related to each other.

The dahlia show is a judged competition, and the flowers are organized by variety and size. Categories include Anemone, Waterlily, Pompom, Stellar, Collarette, Orchid, Micro Peony, Micro Waterlily, Mignon Single, Orchette, and Ball. When the category references another type of flower such as Waterlily, Peony, or Orchid, it is because that particular variety of dahlia looks like another type of flower. It really is quite fascinating how different all of the dahlias can look.

I took photos of most of the winners. Here are a few:

Honestly, most of the flowers in the room had a first or second place ribbon, even those not assembled on the winners tables. This somehow made perfect sense to me since I think all dahlias are beautiful and are winners in themselves!