Touring Gainesville

Joe and I decided we wanted to start doing some local touring, take advantage of what is close by. On Saturday (8/30) we drove towards Gainesville (which is where our church is). We tried to go to Lake Lanier Islands Resort http://www.lakelanierislands.com/, but unfortunately you can't tour the resort without paying their parking fee. We decided to do that another day, but we were able to see a resorty side to Lake Lanier that we hadn't yet witnessed. It was pretty awesome. Unfortunately the lake is still low.

Part of the reason for touring Gainesville was to eat at Schlotzsky's Deli! We pass it every time we drive to church, so I've been craving it. It was a poorly kept location though, all of the tables were dirty and the floor needed some sweeping. The sandwich was OK, but Joe said Hode baked better bread :)

After eating we found Poultry Park! It is an awesome monument to poultry and eating poultry. It's a bizarre tiny park, but I guess it makes sense since Gainesville is the poultry capital of the world! I posted pictures of the plaques on the monument, they were totally weird and worth a read.

notice the awesome chicken at the top of the spire

The importance of poultry to you

Gainesville: cradle of Georgia's poultry industry

Poultry's importance to Georgia's economy

Right down the street from Poultry Park is Downtown Square, apparently it provides an "entertaining and vibrant Downtown life!" for Gainesville. It was cute-ish, but I couldn't describe it as vibrant.

http://www.gainesville.org/, it's an aerial view of the square.

They did have a strange scale model of the solar system around the square that was interesting. You could walk around the square and check out facts about the various planets in the solar system.

here we are in the Sun

There also was this monument to Confederate soldiers, which I have to admit, looking at the monument while a non-white guy was sitting nearby made me feel a little weird.

On the way home we decided that since we were out we would hit the Hoschton scarecrow festival; apparently they set a new Guinness World Record http://www.scarecrowstampede.com/. They were cute and bizarre.

As you can see, the church decided to make a nativity with scarecrows, a little weird.

Then we hit the Braselton cemetery. I had been wanting to drive into it, because it has these awesome stones at the entrance, which makes me think that it's going to be old and awesome. It wasn't quite as exciting as I was hoping, but it was a really nice setting.

Here's the Braselton Heritage & Visitor's Center, the pictures doesn't really show how run down it looks in person.


I like this weird town that we live in. Although living in a big city like London was more of my plan when moving away from Utah, living in a small town is a fun alternative. Braselton is close enough to Atlanta that if we wanted to do something "big city" we can, but I like living where there's variety; we have million dollar houses, regular houses, and shanties all in the same town! Braselton will work for us for a few years.