Who we are, or who we want to be?

We spent this past weekend in Atlanta house-hunting - it was my first time ever in the city, and though Leslie had been there before she didn't really know much about it either. Here's what we learned:

1) I don't know why everybody says the traffic is so bad there. We were in Atlanta from 9:30 Friday night to 4:30 Sunday afternoon and we only hit three traffic jams.
2) The directions to the Airport Hampton Inn say to take a left off the freeway, but it means take a right. Left takes you someplace scary.
3) There are hippies in Atlanta, just like in Asheville, except if they live in the designated hippie zone, Little Five Points, then they must all make even more money than their Asheville cohorts.

In true after-school special fashion, though, probably the most important lesson to learn was about ourselves. Namely, we really had a hard time deciding what kind of environment we'd want to live in down there. Our inclination had been toward an area to the west of the city that has reasonably good access to the airport, where Leslie will have to go often but is still pretty natural. We were attracted to one specific development that has nice homes but more notably neighbors a very nice state park and has its own trails, kayaking center,dog parks and stuff like that. We drove out there Sunday morning and really liked it.

The alternative would be getting something more urban. It'd be somewhat closer to the airport, but of course you give up most of the natural setting and open space in return for being so close to "the action."

The other drawback is that generally you pay more and get less when you're downtown, and frankly, we tend to like the idea of "action" more than actually acting on the action - how often will we really go to the theater? Do we want to pay the downtown premium so that we at least have the option of being the sort of urban hipsters that we think we'd like to be but probably aren't, or do we embrace that part of us that knows what we like, but doesn't try something new?

We went back and forth pretty much all weekend, but we seem to be settling on the urban pioneer route, in both the personal and sociological sense. We may be putting in an offer on a house in the Reynoldstown neighborhood, which is just a mile from downtown and historically African-American, though from what we saw this weekend it looks very diverse today. There's lots of new building and renovations going on, and we found a foreclosure that has a perfect floor plan for us - you've got to be careful with foreclosures, but this one has never been lived in and was apparently repossessed after some kind of mortgage fraud victimized the builder. One great feature of the location is that it is literally two doors down from a cool little coffee bar that has a big dog park in the back, which is obviously perfect for us but we're trying mightily to ignore it in our calculations, since it's only been there for three months and might go out of business any time.

That's the thinking now, anyway. Check back with me in five minutes.