Travel, Hike, Eat. Repeat.: travel tuesday: senoia, georgia

My cousin John couldn't believe that I didn't know that the popular AMC show The Walking Dead is filmed in Georgia.

"It's not even just filmed in Georgia," his southern drawl punctuating every word. "It's filmed in Senoia!"

I grew up in Newnan, Georgia, a now-sprawling suburb 30 minutes southeast of Atlanta. It's in Coweta County. I grew up on the East side of the county. My middle school and high school were far out on the east side, so far I wonder now how they even really count as the same county. But just down the road from my middle school, off of Highway 16 is the small, quaint town of Senoia, or, as fans of the TV show know it, Woodbury. It's about a 15-20 minute drive, if that, from my childhood house.

To be honest with you, I'd never done more than see Senoia at a glance. I had no real reason to go into the town. It's country out there. It's all farm land and there's a house on the two-lane highway with a "Barbie beach." The barbies are dressed for different occasions - festive for the holidays, topless for Spring Break, I kid you not. It's country out there.

The day after John told me about The Walking Dead being filmed practically in our backyard, my girlfriend Tiffany suggested we meet in the middle between her place and my mom's house for dinner. "How about Senoia?" she texted, and I jumped at the opportunity to lay my eyes on the home of the zombies.

Senoia is picture-perfect. It has a Main Street, and the shop fronts are all colors of a gentle palette. The Zan Brown bar is there (Southern Ground Social Club), there's a pizza joint, a chocolate shop that carries zombie-shaped delights, and a coffee house that serves blood orange mimosas that sports a framed picture of the cast and a page from the script where they filmed inside. Fake storefronts dot the the little town - a bookstore that is nothing but a set.

Little known to me, Senoia has been the backdrop and set for a number of TV shows and movies. One of my summer guilty pleasures, Drop Dead Diva, has had film crews there, too. Then there are the southern traditions: Fried Green Tomatoes and Driving Miss Daisy. Every time I go back to rural/suburban Georgia I find more to love about it - bits of culture and history and lore that I wish I had known as a kid. Mel and I agreed as we drove through Atlanta this weekend - Senoia is a place we could happily retire someday.

I've never seen the show, but I feel like I've been a Woodbury resident my whole life. Don't worry - I've got season one queued up on Zan's Netflix.