There's a moment on the drive up, usually somewhere past Jasper, where the city finally lets go of you. You can feel it happen. The radio's still on, the coffee's still warm, the dog in the back seat hasn't moved in thirty minutes — and then the ridgelines start stacking up through the windshield and your shoulders drop a half inch and you realize you haven't been breathing quite right since you left Atlanta.
It starts ugly, because all drives out of Atlanta start ugly. You get on 575 somewhere north of the perimeter and you sit in the traffic you promised yourself you'd beat. You pass the strip malls that look like every other strip mall in Georgia, the Home Depots and the Chick-fil-As and the car dealerships with the giant flags. Woodstock comes and goes. Holly Springs. Canton. The outlet mall with the brown sign. Somewhere around here you stop for gas whether you need it or not, because you know the next good stop won't come for a while.
By Ball Ground, something starts to happen. The lots get bigger. The billboards get weirder. You see the first Peaches sign and the first Boiled P'nuts sign, and they're not trying to be quaint, they're just what's there. The highway narrows down to four lanes and the interstate shield gets traded for a little green one with a 515 on it, and most people miss the transition entirely, but something in your chest notices.
Tate goes by on the right. If you know, you know — the whole town is more or less the marble quarry that built the Lincoln Memorial. The pink mansion on the hill, the kind of place where a senator's daughter got married a hundred years ago, is still sitting there watching the cars go past. You can't see it from 515 but it's there, a half-mile off the road, like a lot of the best things on this drive are a half-mile off the road.
Jasper is where the ridges start. Before Jasper you're in foothills. After Jasper you're in the actual Blue Ridge. The difference isn't subtle. The guardrails go up, the curves get real, the shoulder drops off into a stand of pine that falls away faster than you'd expect. If it's autumn, the whole left side of the highway is on fire for about twenty miles. If it's spring, half the hillside is dogwood. If it's summer, everything is so green it starts to feel excessive, the kind of green that makes Atlanta green look like a parking lot with plants in it.