IF you believe the tourist brochures they print up in Georgia, then you will indeed be convinced that there is a French chateau rising out of rolling, vineyarded hills, guarded by a troupe of toqued chefs, that just happens to have been relocated slightly north of Atlanta.
Or that you must only drive 65 miles from the city’s perimeter to transport yourself to a lush Costa Rican spa. In Napa Valley. Just spitting distance from Tuscany. And also Germany.
In fact, you don’t even really need to leave Atlanta’s perimeter to experience the world outside — there, you’ll find a man who has re-built the White House, complete with Oval Office. (It’s for sale.) Or to go skiing on a mountain of manmade snow. (Over at Stone Mountain, if you’re interested.)
The principle at work here is not so different from the exuberant madness that caused the Mall of America to allow you to dive with sharks in its giant basement aquarium or Las Vegas to provide a view of Venice from the Eiffel Tower. Joyful fakery and cultural piracy are uniquely American. The difference here is that the Atlantans who have built Georgia’s knock-offs of Bavaria, Tuscany and Napa are dead serious about all this.
Which means that to thoroughly enjoy this cornucopia of international options, you will have to maintain your own sense of humor. Otherwise you will fixate on the fact that wherever you go, you will still be surrounded by Georgia’s very recognizable landscape, which simply cannot be twisted into Tuscan hills or snow-capped Alps.
You might concentrate on how, in a Cinderella-like move, your Costa Rican spa room transforms at midnight into a charmless trailer with a caving mattress and poly-fleece blanket.
Or that the breathtaking photos of that chateau were taken from I-85, which whizzes right past it, or the chateau-shaped Holiday Inn Express across the street on its other side.
That would be a mistake, because most importantly, you’d be missing a bargain and — armed with the right attitude — a weekend of hilarious cultural confusion.
In my case — grounded in Atlanta over a period of months with a high-risk pregnancy — my search for something different was intensified more than it would have been, say, if I could leave the state by airplane.
That’s right; I didn’t have to make the attitude adjustment, because I was a travel-starved desperado. If it took driving to the “Alps of North Georgia” (read: the Appalachians) and eating sauerbraten in a gingerbread German inn to convince myself I’d gone somewhere, then that’s what I was going to do.
GEORGIA DOES WINE COUNTRY
As enticing as the postcard-perfect advertisement of Chateau Elan is, the real clincher was its promise to transport me to Versailles, which at Chateau Elan is not the palace but a lobby dining room meant to “conjure up images of the former Quai d’Orsay railway station.” Never mind the obvious inconsistencies; Versailles transforms into a buffet on the weekends. I could hardly wait.
What we found when we got there was not nearly as authentic as you’d expect from a giant conference center wrapped in a chateau shell on 3,500 acres of vineyards in Braselton, Georgia.
Arriving at 8 p.m., we were too late for the Versailles buffet, and were greeted by a table full of steaming holes where the food used to be. But, confided our server, it wasn’t included in our package, so we were better off ordering from the menu, anyway.
What the brochure hadn’t told us was that dinner would be a comedy of errors, performed by an eager troupe of too many staff, all deeply involved in an apparent shift change, who we confused by ordering an appetizer that was not included on our package.
A cold tomato consommé and the breadbasket arrived after a well-done steak, for instance, “because they had not yet been prepared,” according to the server.
But it was hard not to enjoy, primarily because the service screw-ups were made with such solemn grandiosity that we began wondering if this wait staff had been tricked into thinking it was real Versailles.
Ghe food, a strange combination of such, ahem, Continental classics as tempura shrimp and Moroccan chicken, was actually quite good, after all.
Were we transported right to France, as we’d hoped? No. But we were sure transported somewhere. Like all giant all-purpose resorts, Elan is what you make of it.
The rooms have recently been redone, with sky-high beds, giant bathtubs and modern French Country furnishings, and are worth checking into for $129 per night even if you never leave the room. You can, like the stumbling conventioneers and wedding parties we ran into that night, avail yourself of the fact that Elan is Georgia’s largest wine producer, or take a break in the Irish pub, Paddy’s, inexplicably adjacent to the winery.
Or, stay far away from the crowds in a themed spa room, like the Excalibur, which comes with a suit of armor. You can book yourself into its new state-of-the-art Viking teaching kitchen; in addition to tastings and tours of the winery, you’ll participate in a demonstration in your own toque. It all takes you far away, though perhaps not to Versailles.
GEORGIA DOES BAVARIA
Imagine a city settled by conservative German Lutheran immigrants in the 19th century, homesick for their green alpine mountains, their Franconian architecture, their Oktoberfest — and who re-created it and settled down in the United States, nostalgically bringing back their polka festivals and beer-making traditions for 150 years. What you’d be imagining is in fact Frankenmuth, Michigan. Not Helen, Georgia.
Helen, an explosion of gingerbread houses about 90 minutes from Atlanta on I-85 into the Appalachians, is a little like being air-lifted into the world’s largest Christmas Shoppe (emphasis on the extra “p” and “e”). Except that that, too, is in Michigan. What you’ll find in Helen is not so much bound by tradition as it is by the desperation of the Helen Chamber of Commerce, circa 1968.
Virtually deserted by the time the local sawmill had had its way with all the area timber, local businesspeople had to find some compelling reason for people to come, commissioning a town planner — who’d been in Bavaria once — to design them a town.
What he came up with is what you might imagine: a crazy jumble of German-ish buildings, painted with scenes of North Georgia and the Alps, cobblestone streets, and inns manned by local teens in lederhosen.
While it’s as baffling that Helen should have the largest Oktoberfest in the South as it is that Savannah runs one of the biggest St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the country, the thing to do is just go with it.
The town was built for tourism, after all. Head to the Edeweiss German Inn, about 4 miles south of town, whose four-poster bedded “European inn”-style rooms and rustic cottages are no less authentic than, say, the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont, after all.
You can pretend that that view of Mt. Yonah is, well, ok, that’s a stretch. But park yourself at one of the wooden tables at the inn’s restaurant, The Vines, and you can get a relatively convincing schnitzel or sauerbraten. Or a shrimp po’boy.
The selection is weird, but the food is fun. Just make sure that you do as the dress code suggests — probably from experience serving the local community — and remove your doo-rag and muscle tee on the way in.
Back in town, visit one of the many shops that makes no distinction among the various countries of northern Europe. A good one is the Scandinavian & European Import Company on North Main, your source for a lot of unrelated but strangely compelling merchandise like beer steins, nutcrackers and cuckoo clocks. And trolls.
Hansel and Gretel Candy Kitchen just down the street is not so much a great source for German sweets as it is for praline pecans and Southern divinity. You won’t be in Bavaria; then again, you will be transported out of this somewhat depressing part of the Appalachians.
Could real German settlers have done much better? Probably. Then again, there aren’t any around to judge, so settle in, listen to some polka, and enjoy.
GEORGIA DOES COSTA RICA (IN GEORGIA’S NAPA VALLEY, AND ALSO ITS TUSCANY)
I first heard of Pura Vida Resort & Spa from a friend who’d gotten married at one of Dahlonega’s area vineyards just an hour north of Atlanta.
It sounded suspiciously like the relatively well-known Costa Rican spa, which also has a Tulum, Mexico outpost, so I decided to check it out. It is indeed part of the Costa Rica spa family, though unexpectedly, it’s the most recent addition — not the original.
Housed in a replica of a 1930s farmhouse set on a hill of cascading trailers that look like log cabins, visiting it cemented the fact in my mind that it is easier to create rustic elegance on a beach in the Yucatan or the jungles of Costa Rica than in the rural hills of The Land that Economic Development Forgot.
Once we let go of the idea that Pura Vida should hold fast to a prescribed set of rules about spa resorts (like that they should have an actual spa in them and not just a trailer with a couple of beds inside), we had a great time.
For instance, I got an earful of the town gossip from my facialist. At dinner in the farmhouse, we were seated next to the 20-year-old chef’s grandmother, who asked us to encourage her grandson to break away from this backwater and seek his fortune in Iraq. We found that here in our trailer, no television was just depressing, not relaxing, so we broke away and drove to Walmart for cheap paperbacks (try that in Costa Rica). We listened at breakfast to the desk lady call all her friends in town to convince them to take a yoga class so we wouldn’t be the only ones to show up.
In other words, the whole experience was so delightfully wrong, it was right. We used Pura Vida as a base from which to explore the town of Dahlonega, site of America’s first real gold rush. Its 1836 courthouse houses a $5 million gold coin collection from the long-defunct Dahlonega mint, and you can pan for gold and take an underground tour at the Consolidated Gold Mine nearby.
We drove the rolling hills through the BlackStock, Frogtown Cellars, Three Sisters and Wolf Mountain wineries, convincing ourselves that we were in Napa 30 years ago. The day ended at Monteluce Estate and Vineyards, Dahlonega’s new Tuscan-style development, whose restaurant, La Vigne, in a was actually worth the trip on its own.
This, apparently, is where you go if you’re a Dahlonegan who has arrived. And over spectacular porcini ravioli with truffled microgreens from the restaurant’s garden and frisee salad with mascarpone polenta croutons, we congratulated ourselves on getting transported four different ways in a single day.
5 PLACES TO LOSE YOURSELF IN GEORGIA
1)Chateau Elan The Atlanta area’s premier French conference resort, equestrian center, winery and spa! You’ll find it at 100 Tour De France (but of course!) in Braselton. Call (800) 233-9463 or visit www.chateauelan.com
2) The Dahlonega Wineries Determined to be a little piece of Napa/Tuscany/Other in North Georgia gold mining country. Stop at Three Sisters Vineyards and Winery (439 Vineyard Way, Dahlonega; [706] 865-9463; www.threesistersvineyards.com), BlackStock Winery: (5400 Town Creek Road, Cleveland; [706] 219-4927; www.bsvw.com); Frogtown Cellars: (700 Ridge Point Drive, Dahlonega; [706] 865-0687; www.frogtown.com) and Montaluce Winery and Estates (501 Hightower Church Road, Dahlonega; [706] 867-4060; www.montaluce.com).
3) Pura Vida Wellness Retreat and Spa A yoga retreat at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, inexplicably placed there by the folks who brought you the Costa Rican and Mexican Pura Vida wellness centers. (400 Blueberry Hill, Dahlonega; [866] 345-4900; www.puravidausa.com)
4)Stone Mountain Park Transforms into “Snow Mountain Park” in winter, with a little help from the snow machine. (US Highway 78 East, Exit 8, Stone Mountain; [800] 401-2407; www.stonemountainpark.com)
5) Helen A dramatic interpretation of Bavaria in the Appalachians. Contact the welcome center for more information (726 Bruckenstrasse, Helen; [800] 858-8027; www.helencvb.com).