THERE’S a rhythm to watching, eating and pedaling your way through the 667-mile Tour de Georgia, a roving, carnivalesque professional road cycling race (held this year April 16 to 22) that brings about 500,000 visitors to some of Georgia’s highest mountains and most colorful hamlets. About 120 are competitors in the race. For most of the rest, the tour is part sports spectacle, part Appalachian sightseeing trip and part movable party.
Over seven days, the tour moves through a landscape of sandstone ridgelines; gushing, rhododendron-lined creeks; blooming dogwoods; and green mountain vistas. Quirky distractions are inextricably linked to stops along the way: Peachtree City, where cars are banned and residents tool around on 85 miles of golf-cart trails; Dalton, home to more than 100 carpet outlet stores; Rock City, where visitors roam through a network of mountaintop caves adorned with glow-in-the-dark gnomes; Stone Mountain, where a laser light show illuminates the faces of Confederate leaders carved into a massive hunk of granite.
