This month was all about my trip to Atlanta, Georgia from October 10th – 23rd, staying with one of my best friends and his family. I hadn’t seen him in 3 years and the rest of his kin for well over 10 years, so it was due time. The two other incentives were that we’d celebrate his birthday and we’d do that in the form of our own ‘Wizards on Holiday’ camp at the regional Burning Man festival ‘Alchemy: the Georgia Burn‘ in Fairburn, just one hour from his home in Roswell.
Warning: this is going to be long, long post.
Just before I left I sent in my submission for the Framelines street assignment #19 ‘Sub Frames’.
Brussels – Washington DC – Atlanta.
I had brought my old Nikon D200, the Fuji X100S and reckoned I would, for the first time, shoot with my mobile phone for a large portion of the trip and at night at the burn. Good thing its camera features were up to par.
In preparation for the burn, we started our arts and crafts DIY projects for our camp, building the camp sign (Wizards on Holiday), the bar for coffee and related tangibles in exchange for conspiracy theories.
In between we went on a road trip to Cashiers in North Carolina, part of the area that was hit by Hurricane Helene, to meet up with family and friends at the family’s cabin in the Appalachian Mountains.
On our way, we stopped at Jaemor Farms to enjoy its harvest fest, find our way in the corn maze and shop for some fresh produce.
Onward we went, to North Carolina.
It was incredibly relaxing at the cabin up in the mountains, to be away from it all for just a few days. Unwinding, a resident dog, playing Wingspan, waking up early to the sounds of Appalachia, breakfast in town in the place that become the center of coordination to help out the community, browsing the local market and dropping off some food supplies for the local relief efforts by the Rotary.
On our trip back we admired the majesty of the Whitewater falls and the backroads of North Carolina leading us back to Atlanta.
Upon our return and finishing our Burn prepping, I had a wholesome lunch with a friend of the family and food revolutionary Rashid Nuri (author of Growing Out Loud and founder of Atlanta’s first organic urban farm, now Truly Living Well Center for Urban Agriculture) at Mary Mac’s Tea Room. So much to talk about and he signed his book for me.
We hauled all our stuff (so much stuff!) to Fairburn and started setting up the Wizards on Holiday camp.
It was a sweet coming together of Burn friends and otherwise, ready to ‘light the void’.
It would be too much to describe and show all that went down those 5 days, but let the following selection be your guide.
I headed back home the next day, with a heavy heart and Georgia on my mind.
…but mitigated by Milo’s welcome.
