Weekend Getaways for Atlanta Residents in North Carolina and Tennessee

If you are in the Atlanta area, there are places to get away for a long weekend.

1. About three and a half hours north of Atlanta is Cherokee, North Carolina. The main city on the Cherokee Indian Reservation. The Cherokee have always been a friendly tribe. They were one of the first Indian tribes to have their own written language. One of the first things to have planned is a tour of an authentic Cherokee village. Here you can see how the Cherokee lived in the 1800 hundreds and before. The tour shows everything from the housing to the skills needed to survive in the past for the Cherokee Indians. Even though the Cherokee Indians were peaceful the government wanted their land so the Cherokee were relocated to Oklahoma. This relocation was a force march and almost half of the died or was killed on this long hard trip. The forced march was know as The Trail of Tears.

The ancestors of the Cherokee Indians living on the Reservation today didn't like the poor land that they were given and slipped off the Oklahoma Reservation and returned to what they considered their land in north Georgia and southern North Carolina. These became known as the East Cherokee and the ones that stayed in Oklahoma were the Western Cherokee. When you get to Cherokee make sure to buy tickets for Unto These Hills. This is a play the Indians perform that depicts the Trail of Tears and the hardships that the Cherokee Indians lived with everyday. Threw all the hardships they knew the Tribe remained peaceful.