We arrived in Atlanta on a Tuesday afternoon so humid the air felt like a warm cloth pressed to the face, and Lia laughed because our shirts were soaked before we’d even left the car park. Someone at the rental desk told us, without irony, that Atlanta is a city in a forest, and I didn’t believe him until we crested a hill on the interstate and saw the towers rising straight out of a green sea of oaks and pines. It’s a place that hides itself. You have to walk into it, slowly, before it decides to show you anything.
Walking Sweet Auburn
The first morning we took the streetcar to Sweet Auburn and walked the block where Martin Luther King Jr. was born. The house is a modest yellow Queen Anne, and standing on its porch I felt the strange weight of ordinary rooms where enormous things began. A few doors down, Ebenezer Baptist Church still holds services, and a recording of one of his sermons drifted out through open windows into the street. Lia and I sat on a low wall and said nothing for a long while. Afterwards we walked to the reflecting pool where he and Coretta are buried, and a groundskeeper told us the eternal flame had never once gone out.
The BeltLine and its murals
By afternoon we needed to move, so we found the Eastside Trail of the BeltLine, an old railway corridor turned into a ribbon of path threading through the city. It was crowded in the best way: cyclists, dogs, teenagers with speakers, a man selling boiled peanuts from a cooler. Murals covered every wall and underpass, some political, some just joyful, and Lia kept stopping to photograph them until the light went gold. We drifted off the trail into Ponce City Market, an old Sears building now full of food stalls, and ate too much before climbing to the rooftop for a view back over the treetops.
Piedmont Park and the smoke of the South
Our last full day belonged to Piedmont Park, where families spread blankets under enormous trees and the skyline floated above the meadow like a backdrop someone had painted. We rented nothing, planned nothing, just lay in the grass while a saxophone player practiced somewhere behind us. That evening a woman at a barbecue joint near the park watched me struggle to choose and simply built me a plate herself: brisket, collards, mac and cheese, a slice of white bread to catch the sauce. Lia said it was the best meal of the trip, and I couldn’t argue. The South, we decided, feeds you like it means it.
Getting There
Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest airport on earth, so nearly everyone changes planes here at some point; we simply stayed. From the airport the MARTA train runs straight downtown in about twenty minutes for a couple of dollars, which felt almost too easy. Once in the city, though, distances stretch and the heat conspires against walking everything, so we mixed the streetcar, the BeltLine on foot, and short rideshare hops. Spring and autumn are kindest; come in July, as we did, and simply surrender to the humidity and the slower pace it forces on you.