What Happens When You Get Lost in Midtown

In an effort to get to know the city I’m living in, I’ve mad it a habit–probably not a very safe one– of wandering around various neighborhoods of the city. The first time I did this, I was just on Broad Street and wandered around that area, and ultimately spent an hour and a half trying to find my way back to my car. Luckily, this time, I was accompanied by three other friends, and we decided to start in Piedmont Park. Our main reason for choosing Piedmont Park was that the Black Pride festival was going on. It was definitely a fun experience to walk around and just people watch, let alone actually partake in the events. Anyways, fast forward a half hour or so, and we decide to go PokeHunting because Piedmont Park is a gold mine for that. We ended up walking around the entire park, and we find this bridge that is actually for cars. We thought that was kind of weird how there is a road that cuts through the park. As we crossed that road, we stumbled upon a whimsical sculpture (picture on the left). Immediately, I knew we had come across a segment of the Beltline, so my friends being fellow art-lovers wanted to follow the Beltline trail. I thought it was very interesting that in the middle of the city, there was a forest and a creek that looked very similar to the ones back home. Along this trail, we found an interesting sculpture of a face with a bunch of eyes that seemed to be from some kind of Greek Mythology (pictured on the right). We followed the trail until it opened up into a paved road, and we quickly realized we had no idea where we were. The trail spit us out behind some strange building with a lot of cars parked along the side of the road that led to the front of the building. We walked up that road and then one of my friends Zach recognized where we were. Apparently we had ended up about four miles away from the entrance to Piedmont Park. So we ended up walking a total of about 12 miles that day, but we did find some cool artwork and a nice little trail that we will probably walk a lot more often now. It’s really interesting to see the cool things you can find when you just let yourself get lost in certain parts of the city. I’m always surprised and rarely disappointed by these little adventures. It’s just one of the many perks of living in such an amazing city.