Is anyone else watching the Walking Dead on AMC? Their other shows are phenomenal, so I have been watching the series from the beginning. No, I do not think the zombie apocalypse is coming, but that series literally hit close to home.

The series is filmed in metro Atlanta, my home since 1998. I recognize most of the landscape in the outdoor scenes, but the quarry was new to me. I thought it must have been in some remote area in rural Georgia, so I started investigating its actual location. Lo and behold, it is located right next to downtown Atlanta. That area is kind of a sketchy part of town (getting better), but I lived about a mile away for seven years. I worked 1/2 mile away for two years. I went to school a mile away for five years (yeah yeah, I took a year off). I rode my bike by that place probably a thousand times and drove by it every weekday on the way to work at a couple of different jobs for a few years.

Atlanta is in the process of turning the quarry into the city’s largest park. I don’t know if it is public yet, but that looks like a really cool place to check out. The metro area has a surprising amount of parks tucked away that I only started discovering when Google maps became close to what it is today.

My point is that I had absolutely no idea that it was there, even though I was right next to it for many years. When I lived and worked in the area, my friends and I actively explored the city around us on bike and on foot, regardless of whether or not we were allowed to be in the area, and we completely missed it.

What else am I missing? What are you missing?

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