I decided to make this installment of Accidentally car-free part recreational, part professional. So I packed up my laptop and a few other work supplies and walked over to the Chattahoochee Coffee Company at the Eddy at Riverview Landing.
I love coffee shops. I love meeting people in coffee shops, working in coffee shops, and getting to know regulars in coffee shops. I’ve underutilized Chattahoochee Coffee Company, and I plan to remedy that, starting with this walk. Having a coffee shop within walking distance is a treasure.
According to Google Maps, the route I took made the one-way trip 1.7 miles, but I added a good bit of distance to the round-trip by exploring the industrial cul de sacs west of Riverview Road.
The route I took was Brookside Dr. -> Roberts Drive -> Oakdale Road -> Dickerson Drive -> Riverview Road.
The first mile of the trip was in typical suburban subdivision like the photo below.
The notable thing about the whole walk was that there are a number of steep hills like this one at the top of Roberts Drive as it intersects with Oakdale Road.
Dickerson Drive is interesting because it is one of the last remnants of the semi-rural roads that covered South Cobb as recently as the 1980s. The sad thing is the wooded area in the steep dropoff has become a dumping area for old furniture, tires, and the normal kinds of smaller litter people throw from cars.
One of the traits of driving everywhere is that you don’t necessarily notice things like this, and if a problem is never noticed, it never gets fixed.
The bottom of Dickerson Drive features a few of the industrial sites that still dominate large parts of Riverview Road.
As I rounded the corner onto Riverview Road, both the finished parts of Riverview Landing and what seems like the perpetual construction of new buildings came into view.
I really do hate to dwell on the negative things I see along my routes, because the walks are for the most part enjoyable, but I have to point out things like this.
The image below is of a nearly new mixed-use path crushed by either trucks or heavy construction equipment parked on them. This isn’t the only one of these. There are several along the section of path closest to Dickerson Drive, where it ends. Constructing the path only to have it crushed by equipment involved in building out the same mixed-use project is really pretty insane.
When I worked in construction and related industries, we didn’t really have to be told “don’t damage the existing work,” but if we did damage something, the subcontractor we worked for was responsible for the repairs.
So now we arrive at the good part.
I bought a cup of coffee, sat at one of the outside tables, and worked outside, switching to iced tea later. It was a bit cloudy, and occasionally a tractor-trailer would roar by, but overall the experience reminded me of living a block from Joe’s Coffee in East Atlanta, before marriage and work brought me to Cobb County.
After I’d worked for a couple of hours, I wandered around back, and learned something I didn’t know. Smyrna built a city park adjacent to the river and the development, but I had never checked to see what Smyrna had named the park.
Mystery solved. It’s Riverview Park, which is the obvious name for it. This is the bandstand in front of rows of bleachers.
I wandered around the edge of the river, taking photos of things I’d photographed many times before, explored some of the industrial cul de sacs on the opposite side of Riverview Road, then made the trek back home.
In the next article I intend to turn my attention to cycling, beginning with pulling my bike out of the garage, inventorying my supplies, and seeing whether I can do enough maintenance on it myself to get it roadworthy.
While I can do a lot of my grocery shopping by foot, the bicycle will extend my reach considerably.
