North Georgia Gems: Waterfalls, Bavarian Village, & an Alpine Coaster!

We had no idea that stuff like this existed in Georgia. This is wild. Last time you saw us we were freezing our butts off in Nashville, Tennessee and at the end of our Nashville vlog we said that we weren't sure where we were heading to next, so surprise we're in northern Georgia. To be 100% honest we had no idea how many trails and outdoor activities there were in Georgia. The Appalachian Trail starts here, there are tons of waterfalls, so today we're going to be exploring some nature and a cute looking mountain town nearby. We had a really hard time deciding what to do today because there are just so many options in this area, but we finally settled on Tallulah Gorge State Park which is this two mile long gorge and a thousand feet deep. We are going to hike the Hurricane Falls Trail which is a two mile loop trail and apparently it's over a thousand steps like down and back up so good workout. A little bit of workout for us. We are maybe two minutes from where we started and we saw this overlook number three and I didn't know what to expect from it but wow we're already starting off with a lot of beauty. Raging! I saw photos of this from not too long ago and it was nowhere near this much water. It rained a lot the last couple days so I think it's just extra powerful right now. I was not expecting it to be that big. Every day they give out a hundred permits to access the gorge floor and when you get down here you'll see all these suspense and all these red warning signs so only if you have that permit you can go past this point and you have to be in person to get the permit so basically you would just show up a little bit or maybe a lot before they actually open to wait in line to get the permit and according to their Facebook page which is where they keep updates on when or if they're giving out permits they have not been giving out the permits for a while now and I think I know why because I think you walk on these rocks or walk across the river that's the access you get but there's a lot of water right now that would not be safe at all but I think in the summer it's probably a more likely bet so coming in the summer check that out because it would be really fun to walk across these. We're on our way back up legs are burning all these stairs. I think we just went up over 600 steps and I don't think the last time we actually hiked was since our enchantments backpacking trip in like September so we're really out of hiking shape oh man that was hard despite all of our complaining about the stairs and how hard it is it feels so good yeah to be back out in nature and more mountainous area we really miss living in Washington we're having so much fun on the road but we really miss hiking all the time in Washington so we're really excited for this weekend to get a dose of nature yeah I mean we've been in a lot of cities and hanging out in libraries and stuff like that that we normally do when we're working so it's nice to get out get some fresh air get some sun on us and we're not really here the best time of year it is the winter it's late January and all the trees are dead yeah most of the trees are dead it's definitely not the most scenic time to be in nature at least you know in this part of the U.S. where there's not a ton of evergreen trees but it's still beautiful yeah we just wanted to get out yeah and I bet it's even more beautiful in the summer in the fall so this has been really nice even though it's hard we made it into Anna Ruby Falls it's cash only it's three dollars a person and they give you a cool little sticker it's super cute we're really lucky that we had some laundromat money left over because we only had a five dollar bill and then we just dug through our laundry money and we got a dollar and quarter so we're very lucky that we have to go to laundromats yeah but it's a really easy hike to get there it's only 0.8 miles round trip and it's paved the entire way but from the photos we've seen it looks really beautiful I don't know if you can see behind me but we're walking up to the waterfall and oh my gosh it is way bigger than I thought it would be we almost didn't come here but so far just from this glimpse I'm really glad we did we had no idea that stuff like this existed in Georgia this is wild so the whole reason this little day trip's even happening today is I was googling unique things to do in Georgia just trying to figure out our plans and I came across the town of Helen and just like one of our favorite towns in Washington Leavenworth it's a Bavarian themed town so in 1968 the town leadership got together and decided they wanted to revitalize the town so they decided to recreate it as a Bavarian village town and I guess the revitalization worked because apparently this is the third most visited city in Georgia after Atlanta and Savannah just like Leavenworth this town is absolutely precious we're having just so much fun just walking around and seeing all the buildings we haven't even really gone into anything we just like looking at it all and we hear they have a really crazy Oktoberfest it's normally like six or seven weeks but this year since it's their 50th anniversary it's nine weeks so if you want to come experience this place probably at its best come to Oktoberfest we kept walking by this one area and getting this whiff of something magical and we finally were like it's either cookies or chocolate so we looked in the window and saw them making fudge and it was like a boiling thing of chocolate so we went in and got some and it's a brick look how big this is it was it was eight dollars for a slice and this is seriously like a huge piece of brick of fudge and we got the chocolate peanut butter and they had samples out so we've already kind of tried it but we love this flavor anyways but it's one oh my goodness it just like felt oh yeah that's so good it's like a Reese's yeah i think we'll be um working on this for a while so the cuteness of this town was enough to get us to come here by itself but then we discovered they have something that we've been wanting to do for a really long time we're going on an alpine coaster i'm so excited going to disney got us really hooked on roller coasters again so as soon as we saw that they had this here we just knew we had to do it so the extra fun thing about alpine coasters is that you control the brake so if we crash it's our own fault we're very we're very cozy in here good thing he likes me i'm a little nervous i'm the one who controls so yeah adam's controlling the brake so it's all on him it's awesome we haven't even done anything yet we're going up a hill one big bonus is there was no line yeah perks of coming here in the winter beats the heck out of disney we loved it so much that we're going again it's half off the good thing is it's half off the second time we go we're just gonna keep going okay we're only doing it one more time but oh my gosh that was oh that was so much fun that might have been more fun than a real roller coaster i don't know you're going fast round two yeah this is like space mountain but in the daylight so you actually get to see what's happening in the mountains actually in the mountains not in space but that's okay oh just as fun the second time that was seriously the best 45 dollars we've ever spent which is a lot of money but it was just a lot of fun i wish they sold like a weekend pass or all day passes i would just go on oh my gosh that was so much fun so this is actually the only alpine coaster in georgia this is called georgia mountain coaster so if you're in helen or near helen you gotta come check it out and if you do come and do it make sure you do it twice because the first time you get to feel how it is and then the second time you can just release the brake and just go full speed the whole way we have a fudging update for you that brick of fudge that we bought is just a little nub now riding the roller coaster we worked up a little bit of an appetite for some fudge you can't stop eating it is so good so what's made today extra special and fun for us is that we're getting to explore a place that a week ago even we had never even heard of or we you know was never just in our plan of places to go to yeah i mean we sit down uh when we were in texas a few weeks ago and kind of made like a rough itinerary of kind of like a the dream places we wanted to go to then we knew we were going to be around and so we had an extra day in between going from tennessee to atlanta and we were just looking for something cool to do and found this and so we're really excited even though we only have the weekends to explore because we work during the week so we're very limited like we have two days a week that we can go do fun stuff so we try to be very selective on what we go and do and we're excited to find more stuff like this i think you know we'll be near more big cities but we want to go off the beaten path a bit and find these smaller places yeah i mean we have a ton of fun in the small towns and so it's fun to find stuff that's not on the beaten path yeah stuff that's a little bit different and maybe places that you guys had never heard of or had any thought of going to and maybe now you'll be slightly convinced to go so we're just gonna hang around here for a little bit more the sun's going down the buildings are starting to light up so we're gonna wait and see what the buildings look like at dark with the lights on them and then head on back to the van