Howdy, friends! Before we get back to the Yenta’s regularly scheduled program of Jewishy snarkiness, I want to thank y’all for all the nice emails wondering if we had been abducted by backwater hillbillies and made to do treifful things in the wilderness. Have no fear – we returned safe and sound last week after an amazing, wonderful North Georgia experience, the only banjo-picking to be heard was El Yenta Man’s attempts on his guitar (which was disturbing, but hardly dangerous.)

We rented this sweet little cabin on Lake Nottelly near the tiny town of Blairsville, a rustic retreat where we canoed and fished and barbecued and chased fireflies and bellylaughed over the dog trying to swim and rode horses and tubed down a really cold creek and ate pretty decent Mexican food and soaked in the hot tub and watched the Olympics and unwound from life and enjoyed each other’s company. We brought home a couple souvenirs; a jar of pickled okra, an antique hummingbird letter holder to hang on the front door, and most special of all, a fairy house from Sleepy Hollow Enterprises, made by a retired Disney architect who has created a magical world all his own in the mountains.

This low-budget road trip beat an expensive trek to Disneyworld or dealing with airports, and I feel like I got to know my family again after being a Busy Working Mother for the last year. We rounded out the trip with a stop at Callaway Gardens outside Atlanta, a huge man-made nature preserve full of bike trails and lakes and a butterfly conservatory with hundreds of different species of winged exotic creatures that landed on our heads and brought us eye-to-antennae with the majesty and breadth of creation.

By far the most exciting side activity was a trip to the Wild Animal Safari in Pine Mountain, where you purchase Soylent Greenish pellent snacks and drive your OWN CAR into a park full of giraffes, goats, antelope, cattle, zebra, hilariously scuttling Vietnamese potbellied pigs and crazy-eyed ostriches that stick their drooly heads INSIDE the windows and eat the food and anything else that might get too close – I am telling you it was MESHUGGEH. Yet memorable, and worth the entire bottle of hand sanitizer I doused the children in afterwards. Don’t worry, we left the dog in the front office.

(And how ABOUT dem Olympics, nu? I didn’t really research the Jewish athletes, but hey, that Mary Wineberg sure can move, right? She was smokin’ in that 400m relay and got the gold! Wait, what? A name like Wineberg, but not Jewish? Man, I gotta get my head back into my Google;) But I do know my main woman Dara Torres not only got her two silver medals but also proved herself a true sportswoman and mensch, if we may apply that to a woman, for her insistence that the judges wait for the Swedish swimmer to change a ripped suit.)

You may have noticed that this is a pictureless post. For all the fun, love and laughter the Family Yenta experienced on our trip, apparently the price was the loss of all our photos while trying to download them. *sigh* Guess you just had to be there.