Last Saturday Dave was feeling a bit antsy and wanted to “do something”. We were in the second day in our visit with Mom and Dad and he’d been left behind the day before while the gals went shopping. Since we were running low on Nora Mills pancake mix, I suggested we take a drive down to Helen to the Nora Mill to pick some up.
All were invited to join us but only Quyen was interested. Dad and “the boys” had some work to do around the homestead to prepare for Dad’s new garage and Mom and Debbie said that Helen was a place you only needed to see once. So, the three of us started off just after breakfast on our adventure.
Helen, GA started out as a logging community. After the trees were gone, the citizens of Helen decided to reinvent the town into an Alpine tourist destination with a seemingly unending line of gift shops, candy shops and restaurants all decorated like a scene from Heidi. As we walked through the Beer Garden, I even heard a German version of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby”. We did a little shopping, ate some passable German sausage and then headed off to the mill. Nora Mill is an actual water power mill on the Chattahoochee River offering a good selection of stone ground corn products including pancake mixes, cereals and grits.
As a Yankee gal, I was not raised on grits and it has taken me a long time to acquire an appreciation for them. I started with cheese grits, moved on to shrimp and grits and now I’ll eat some plain grits with a little butter and salt and pepper. In my humble opinion, the stone ground grits are the best. Nora Mills calls them “Georgia Ice Cream” (just like mashed potatoes are “Polish Ice Cream”). I did go a little nuts in the store, grabbing several bags of ground goodness.If you want to try them yourself, check out the website: www.noramill.com.
By the time we left the mill we were all tired and ready to head back to the homestead. I think I forgot to mention that all the German goodness in Helen is accessed by one two lane highway. As we were leaving town heading to the mill, cars were backed up bumper to bumper in both directions in an alpine gridlock. Not wanting to sit in the traffic, Dave elected to continue on the road out of Helen in hopes of finding an alternative route. As he drove I sat juggling the Garmin and the navigation app on my phone. Unfortunately, he was driving faster than I could get the information. Quyen, in the back seat was frantically searching her phone. After a few heated words exchanged in the front seat, Dave turned around and headed back to Helen where we joined the conga line out of town.
That lasted for about two minutes. After sending a telepathic FTS!, Dave abruptly turned to the left making a u-turn and we were heading out of town again. From that point on there was very little said for a long time. The road signs all said we were heading toward Atlanta, not where we wanted to go. But, when you’re driving in and around mountains, the route choices are few. Finally we were able to determine a route back north and made a turn onto Old Blairsville Rd. Since I knew were Blairsville was in relation to where we wanted to be, I knew were were at least headed in the right direction. Sadly, along with our turn north, we were also going up a mountainside.
With successive yellow road signs with squiggles indicating the course of the road, up we climbed. I rarely get car sick, but I was pretty close. Quyen was silent. Later she confessed she was tracking our journey on her navigation app. Finally we saw a sign for Hiawassee. Ironically, the distance to Hiawassee was almost the same as it was when we were in Helen, forty minutes earlier.
As we neared our destination, the tension eased and we all decided that despite all the grand advances we’ve made, it would always be a good idea to keep an atlas in the car like we used to. A big picture overview would have certainly helped. As for Helen, I’m not sure I want to go back, at least not in the summer, or not with Dave and I’ll probably order my grits directly from the mill. It’s worth the shipping to have someone else drive the stuff out of town for me!