Articles about Fashion and Travel

Golf fans the world over can attest to why Augusta, Georgia is known as the Garden City of the South when they tune into the Masters Golf Tournament every April and see the lush greenery and gorgeous azaleas surrounding the course at Augusta National. Don’t even try to visit this former capital of Georgia during that week unless you’re one of the lucky ones to have scored one of the toughest-to-get tickets in sports.

I’d traveled here a few times for the Masters, but had the chance to spend a weekend here recently and was delighted to find out how much more the city has to offer. After driving about 150 miles east from Atlanta, we stayed in the lovely, historic Partridge Inn. Built in the 1820s as a two-story residence, the inn opened as a hotel in 1908 and underwent a major renovation in October 2006. The inn is on the edge of the historic neighborhood of Summerville, where residents built homes to escape the heat and mosquitoes found closer to the city where it borders the Savannah River.

We enjoyed a visit to Woodrow Wilson’s childhood home, built for his father, a minister for First Presbyterian church. You can see where the future president etched his name on one of the downstairs windows. Our favorite activity was a boat ride down the Augusta Canal, which brought an industrial boom to the city after its construction in 1845. After years of neglect it was revived and became a National Heritage Area. An ornate bridge on the canal named after Major Archibald Butt, who died on the Titanic was saved from destruction after a citywide “Save Our Butt” campaign.

Big fans of sweets, my husband and I still weren’t quite up to the challenge of eating an entire piece of cake at Boll Weevil Café and Sweetery, which we decided takes a village to devour. With a wide variety of ethnic offerings, Blue Sky Kitchen downtown is worth a stop for lunch or dinner.

In between sites, we managed to indulge in one of our favorite activities – porch sitting. The Partridge Inn has huge verandahs, where we had dinner and listened to music on Saturday night, and enjoyed the extensive buffet at Sunday brunch.

So forget the lyrics of “American Dream” – “Augusta Georgia is just no place to be.” There are plenty of reasons any travelgirl would love to visit here. For more information, visit www.augustaga.org