My husband Marv and I have been coming up to Helen for the second-to-last week of July for fourteen years. We started coming up after his second knee replacement, when his cardiologist said the heat in Tampa in July was, in the cardiologist’s words, “not serving him.” We tried Asheville first, but the parking situation in Asheville is, frankly, a nightmare. We tried Gatlinburg, but Marv’s sister was already going to Gatlinburg and we did not, that year, want to share. So we tried Helen.

I will say this. The trees are very nice.

The trees are, in fact, the best part. They are large, they are green, they shed leaves in the fall (we have not been here in the fall, but I have seen the photographs), and they provide a meaningful temperature differential against the parking-lot asphalt. I am told the leaves are the entire reason some people come here. I can see why. The leaves are, on a per-leaf basis, very competitive.

The little shops are also, broadly speaking, charming. The cuckoo-clock store is exactly what you would want a cuckoo-clock store to be. The Christmas store, in July, is a delightful absurdity. The pretzel cart on the corner of the main street — I do not remember the name of the gentleman who runs it, but he has a striking presence — is a part of the experience that we have, in fourteen years, never failed to incorporate.

The river, which I am told is the Chattahoochee, is also fine. We have not, ourselves, gone tubing. Marv’s knee, again. But we have stood on the bridge and watched other people tube. I have noticed that, on tubing, people seem to be having approximately the same amount of fun that they would be having on any other body of water that someone had handed them an inflatable on. I am not going to make a strong claim that Helen tubing is qualitatively superior to, say, the lazy river at the Wyndham Grand Clearwater Beach. I am going to say it is comparable.

But here is my issue, and I want to be very clear about it: it is an eight-hour drive.

It is eight hours and seventeen minutes from our house in Tampa to the Helen Welcome Center. We have driven it. We have driven it fourteen times. We have, in fourteen years, optimized the route. We know which Buc-ee’s in central Florida to stop at, which gas station in southern Georgia is reliably clean, and which exit on I-75 has the diner that does the omelet that Marv likes. We have, in eight hours, three meals and four bathroom breaks. The drive is not unmanageable.

But it is eight hours.

If Helen were, say, four hours away — if Helen were, in some hypothetical alternative geography, located on the panhandle near Destin — we would come more often. We would come, possibly, three or four times a year. We would, in our retirement, conceivably consider purchasing one of the smaller cabins in the woods south of the town, the ones that are reasonably priced if you are willing to be somewhat far from the river.

But Helen is not on the panhandle. Helen is in the mountains. The mountains are nice, I have said this. But the mountains are not, in any meaningful logistic sense, near a beach.

I do not want it to sound as though I am asking Helen to move. I understand that Helen cannot move. The cuckoo-clock store cannot, structurally, be relocated to Destin. The Bavarian-style buildings, the ones with the wooden balconies and the painted shutters — I am told there are zoning ordinances about them, that they cannot be removed even if anyone wanted to remove them, which nobody does. The river is in a fixed channel. The river will not be diverted.

What I am suggesting is that, in any future decisions about where to develop additional Bavarian-themed mountain villages in the southeastern United States, the relevant municipal authorities should consider proximity-to-beach as a substantive criterion. There is, in the central Florida panhandle, ample land. There are several state-park-eligible parcels on the Apalachicola Bay that, if they could be designated as Bavarian historic, would provide the same charm with substantially better access to a beach.

I am, I recognize, not the audience the Helen Convention & Visitors Bureau primarily plans for. I am, by their lights, an outlier. The Bureau’s 2024 visitor self-study, which I read on the website before this trip, identified the modal Helen visitor as a married couple from the greater Atlanta area without children, staying for two nights, primarily interested in lodging and food. I am from Tampa. I have grown children. I am here for a week. I am primarily interested in being somewhere that is not Tampa in July, and the Bureau is, I would wager, not building its strategic plan around me.

But I am here. I am, fourteen years running, here. I am buying things at the cuckoo-clock store. I am eating at the Bodensee. I am, in the modest way I am able, contributing to the local economy. And what I am asking, with this column, is that the Helen tourist economy take seriously the possibility that, at the margins, somewhere closer to the Gulf would be — for the Florida demographic specifically — even better.

The trees, again, are very nice.

— Brenda