It’s Distracting.

Tom and I live in Suwanee, Georgia. To us, it’s the perfect combination of convenience (10 minutes from the mall of GA, 30 minutes from Atlanta) and small town feel (cute little town center).

But what continues to make me and Tom laugh is that our friends from bigger, more urban upbringings tell us that we live “in the sticks.” HA. We grew up in the sticks.

You don’t know what it means to be in the sticks until you’ve got memories of chasing cows out of your neighbors’ flower beds, worrying more about deer in the road than crazy drivers, and driving 45 minutes to the closest mall.

In an area where kids hung out in the Kroger parking lot on Friday nights (not me), 10 acres doesn’t seem like a “big” lot of land, and you’re more likely to see people ride their horses than their bikes on the side of the road…that’s the sticks. And that’s where I grew up. I could go on.

I love Covington, the little place I come from. It is mostly rural. My college roommates would tease me because I would refer to going into the part of Covington with shops as “going into town.” They would joke about hitching up the horse and buggy. But Covington is the real deal small town. And I love that about it.

Most of the time.

Lately, I keep finding that Covington is distracting me.

You see, despite it being a little dot on the map, somehow it got discovered. Back in the 70′s, Hollywood found out about Covington and decided it was the perfect location for shooting small town scenes for shows and movies. My parents’ house is actually about 2 miles from The Boar’s Nest from the Duke’s of Hazzard. (Ps- it’s a church now.)

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Remember the Titans, In The Heat of The Night, and several other movies and shows were filmed in Covington as well. Which never really mattered because generally you only recognize your hometown in one or two scenes from the show or movie as you watch it.

Until now. Recently, Tom and I started watching The Vampire Diaries on Netflix streaming. I thought it would be silly, but I actually really like it. Even Tom has been drawn in.

But then, we noticed, we kept being distracted by familiar sites. After the second episode, we started to say, “This HAD to be filmed in Covington. There’s the courthouse. There’s Pace Street. I think that field is on the way out to my parent’s house.”

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The little square in Covington gets featured so much, I finally realized it represents the entire “downtown” of Mystic Falls, the city in the show.

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One of the main characters would pull up and stop his truck right next to the sign for Pace Street, a street that branches off the square. Instead of paying attention to the scene, Tom and I were saying- look- there’s that Cajun restaurant that we ate at with Henry and Dana!

Two of the characters make a road trip  to Georgia in one episode. He says they are going to “a little place outside of Atlanta.” Our eyes met. “Well, they got that right,” I quipped to Tom. They head to “Bree’s Bar.”

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It’s actually a restaurant that sits right off some railroad tracks near the square. Tom’s dad’s business is about a mile from there. Even the green canopy is part of the restaurant; they just threw the “Bree’s Bar” sign over it.

While it is kind of neat to see my hometown on such a popular show, it’s also a bit distracting. When you grow up “in the sticks,” you recognize every little part of your town. It takes you out of the show.

On the other hand, it gives me the opportunity to save you some money. I saw on wikipedia that someone in Covington is offering “tours of Mystic Falls.”

Save yourself the money. Go to any random person from Covington and ask them how to get to the square. Once there, park your car and walk around for two minutes. You’ll have pretty much seen every major scene shot in Covington. Ta-da!

Two minutes to walk our biggest downtown attraction. I told you it was a small town.

~Meghan