Historic Oakland Cemetery

To officially celebrate our anniversary, last weekend Patrick and I set out on an adventure: to spend a day discovering Atlanta without spending too much money. Really, I almost titled this post "Atlanta on the Cheap, Part 1."

Okay, okay, those of you laughing can stop now.

Yes, it's true, we may have been under the mistaken impression that most cities are like Washington, D.C., where you can wander countless memorials and museums and other visit-worthy places (Library of Congress, anyone?) for the price of transportation only. So yeah, Atlanta kinda came with a little sticker shock.

However, when all was said and done, we had a pretty good time. One of our cool finds was the Historic Oakland Cemetery.

It was really great to find such a quiet, peaceful place in the middle of a buzzing metropolis. I'd never really had the chance to wander around a cemetery like this before. It was beautiful. It was also great date material--meandering with no real time restrictions, no screens in front of our faces or music in our ears, just 88 acres of history, of people's lives come and gone, of memories and epitaphs.

That stone is carved like a tree trunk, and it has all sorts of masonic symbols on it. We thought it was pretty cool.

I suppose a graveyard visit seems a little morbid, but the impressions we came away with were mostly of beauty, perspective, and peace. And wow, those tombstones were beautiful.

It was moving to think of the love, honor, and sense of family that these memorials represent, especially when you see the wives and husbands, or mothers and daughters, or other family members right next to each other. However, I also remember thinking, as I peered at some of the tombstones whose words were faded and unreadable, how even these stone memorials don't last forever. It's nice to know that the important things do last.

In any case, it was a wonderful, quiet, relaxing start to a day that was going to get significantly less, well, poignant. Stay posted for our invasion of Dragoncon and our first-timers review of IKEA.