Columbus

Columbus sits on the Chattahoochee River across from Phenix City, Alabama, and for most of the twentieth century its waterfront was a wall of textile mills feeding on the river’s current. When the mills closed and the old dams came out in the 2000s, the city did something unusual: it let the river run wild again and built the world’s longest urban whitewater course right through downtown. Lia and I signed up for a raft trip on our first morning, and within minutes were paddling hard through Class III rapids with the brick shells of old mills rising on either bank — a genuinely strange, thrilling collision of industrial history and adrenaline sport.

Whitewater and the riverwalk

We got dumped from the raft twice, came up laughing and swearing in roughly equal measure, and finished the run soaked and sunburned below the old Eagle and Phenix Mill. Afterward we dried off walking the Chattahoochee RiverWalk, a fifteen-mile paved path that traces the water from the whitewater course down past restored mill buildings now converted into lofts and breweries. Runners and cyclists passed us the whole way, and at a bend near the National Infantry Museum we stopped to watch a heron work the shallows where, a century earlier, the same water would have been churning a cotton mill’s turbines.

Historic downtown

Once we’d changed into dry clothes, we wandered the Historic District a few blocks back from the river, where wrought-iron balconies and antebellum storefronts along Broadway have been carefully restored, many now housing restaurants and the Springer Opera House, designated Georgia’s official state theatre. We ate a plate of fried green tomatoes at a corner diner and got talking with the owner, who told us Columbus was once the second-largest textile manufacturing center in the country — a fact hard to square with the quiet, leafy streets we were sitting on, but visible everywhere in the scale of the old mill buildings ringing downtown.

Getting There

Columbus Airport offers limited regional flights, but most visitors fly into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and make the roughly hour-and-forty-five-minute drive south via I-185. There is no passenger rail service to the city, so a car is essential for getting around, though the historic downtown and riverfront are compact enough to explore on foot once you’ve arrived. The whitewater outfitters and RiverWalk trailheads sit right along the river’s edge downtown, an easy walk from most hotels in the historic district.