Anyone who believes that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be hasn’t been behind the wheel of the 2002 Ford Thunderbird—a Deco turquoise (in this case) two-seat convertible with a 260-horsepower V-8 engine and styling that makes the Euro-competition look like bad Bauhaus.

“Oh . . . my . . . God,” sobbed a man who pulled up next to my co-pilot and me at a stoplight. “It’s about time!” shouted a woman at the otherwise tranquil Atlanta Botanical Garden. “Is it yours?” “How much?” “When can I get one?” dozens asked. Literally hundreds of highway horn beeps and thumbs-ups later, we’d completed a triangle of three prime Georgia resort hotels with some delightful rambling around the north woods between them. Never have I driven a new car that elicited so much attention, all of it raves.

Day One: 4 Miles

Atlanta to Château Élan

Great Drives usually shun cities, but we couldn’t resist the challenge presented by Atlanta: It was recently adjudged by the Texas Transportation Institute to have the second-worst commuter snarls in all of the United States, tied with Seattle and just behind L.A. in terms of hours lost to mindless traffic jams. Yet that same suburbia-serving spiderweb of interstates and ring roads, clogged with SUVs and poseur pickups on weekdays, turns out to be empty on Sunday.

Top down and music up—“Help me Rhonda” was the first refrain I heard, as though the Thunderbird’s radio were tuned to a time warp—we became classic out-of-towners, heading for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center, the Botanical Gardens, the Atlanta Zoo, and finally Georgia’s prime geological monstrosity, Stone Mountain.

Don’t go to the King Center if you’re embarrassed when tears come easily, for they will. Except for the grandiose grave, a mausoleum on a platform in the middle of an enormous blue reflecting pool, it’s a simple site. The core is half a dozen videotape-loop kiosks that tell the story of the Jim Crow “laws” and of an imperfect man who devoted his abbreviated life to changing the course of this imperfect planet. To go to the King Center is to see clearly how casual and open was much of America’s unquestioning contempt for blacks, and how brave were the people who challenged that mind-set.

It’s a dangerous thing for any comfortably white-bread visitor to conclude, but Atlanta today seems to be an American city at great racial peace—another world entirely from the South we saw in the grainy clips at the King Center. Teenagers black and white mix everywhere, and the sight of interracial couples is common. The convulsive racial turbulence of the 1960s and the birth of the civil rights movement seem so very distant, and yet it all happened within the lifetime of many of us, and so much of it happened right here.

Just 18 miles east, on highways 154 and 10, we’ve moved from civil rights to the Civil War, at Stone Mountain, the Confederate Mount Rushmore, an 825-foot-high potato of naked granite. The near-vertical north face of this huge hill features a bas-relief carving of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee, all a-horse and with guidons fluttering, riding forth to battle those who would compromise their way of life. The conductor aboard the cable car that takes us to the top boasts that it is the biggest single such sculpture in the world. When a passenger questions whether it’s actually larger than Rushmore, he explains that the presidential visages are four separate carvings, each of which is smaller than this one.

About 35 miles northeast of Atlanta squats an enormous pseudo–Loire Valley manor, Château Élan, a sumo wrestler of a resort that strains to equate elegance with bulk. The hotel is full, so my co-driver and I are relegated to the Château’s “Lodge” across the highway. While the resort is surrounded by picturesque vineyards and golf links, the Lodge is a painfully plain motel with, in our case, a view of a bright-green BP gas station.

Day Two: 153 Miles

Château Élan to Brasstown Valley Resort

Château Élan and its vineyard are the pride of Don Panoz, who, with his son, Dan, builds America’s only hand-assembled high-performance all-aluminum sports car, the Panoz Esperante. The Panoz shop—certainly Georgia’s only car factory—is half a mile from Château Élan, and you’re welcome to take the same fascinating tour that we did (call 770-867-4796) to see 320-horsepower 155-mile-per-hour custom-finished two-seat Esperante convertibles being assembled. Pick one up for $80,000—the price of a nicely equipped Porsche 911—and you’ll never have to worry about seeing another car like yours in your state, much less on your block.

Bar-bet trivia: Where did the first American gold rush take place? Not Alaska, not California, but Dahlonega, Georgia, about 40 miles up State Road 60 from the Panoz empire, where a small museum in a classic To Kill a Mockingbird Georgia county courthouse memorializes the 1828 event. The arrival of thousands of greedy prospectors, and plenty of firepower, resulted in the eviction of the region’s inconvenient Cherokee Indians. Their brutal forced march to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears is also recounted here, casting an uneasy light on another dark moment from our past.

State roads 52, 115, and 75 out of Dahlonega toward Helen meander through a landscape of rusted pickups left to molder in grassy pastures, old barns pulled earthward by kudzu vines like something out of a Maurice Sendak nightmare, and little churches with tiny prefab steeples and signboards out front. My favorite was, “If you give the Devil an inch, he’ll become a ruler.”

Helen is a Disneyish, mock-Bavarian village filled with wurst, weiss beer, and willkommen signs. Still, it’s a nice place for lunch on a Biergarten terrace above a shady, rattling brook. We walk off the meal with a half-mile hike up to the splendid, triple-chute Anna Ruby Falls in nearby Unicoi State Park, taking shelter in a shallow rock cleft during a sudden downpour and wondering whether the Cherokees ever did the same when they called this their home.

On Route 76, the Thunderbird is well into the enormous clump of commingled Appalachian national forests—Chattahoochee, Cherokee, Nantahala, Pisgah, and Sumter—that stretch from Georgia up into Tennessee and North and South Carolina. Most of the marvelously variegated, dogwood-spotted thickets are second growth, for loggers long ago harvested the cheap, soft, easily hewn Georgia pinewood that became the two-by-four studs in millions of postwar homes.

Every little clove and holler is wreathed in mist from the warm rain, and soon we spot the discreet gateway to our destination for the night: the superb Brasstown Valley Resort, just outside Young Harris. Where did that name come from? I have no idea, and I certainly can’t tell you why there’s a nearby mountain named Old Young Harris.

Day Three: 176 Miles

Brasstown Valley Resort to Barnsley Gardens

At a kitsch-and-quilts store—the roads are dotted with them—I buy a tin sign advertising the ’56 Thunderbird, “America’s most exciting car.” The big old boat in the ad is, yes, the very same Thelma-and-Louise blue as our far trimmer version, though 45 years of paint technology have made the 2002 color vastly more vivid. The quilts, unfortunately, are also vivid: $89 global-economy Chinese reproductions of traditional Appalachian designs in colors brasher than anything ever found in these mountains.

The summit of nearby Brasstown Bald is as high as you can go in Georgia—4,784 feet above sea level. There’s a steep winding three-mile sports-car-challenging road from State Road 66 to the parking lot, then a half-mile hike to the top and a 360-degree view of what must be some of the most rugged, remote terrain in the United States. When Sherman marched through Georgia in 1864, he took an end run around it, else he’d still be there.

Slaughter Mountain, Wolfpen Gap, Trackrock Gap, Chimneytop, Big Frog Mountain, Little Bald Mountain. . .the bosomy hills march off to the distance in every direction, fading into blueness with a scrim of developing thunderheads above them to the south. Far below, our car sits in the almost-empty parking lot, a kind of garish robin’s egg amid all the greenery.

This is one of those corners of our country that make you realize just how huge and beautiful the United States can be. Not because of Arizonan immensity or Coloradan majesty, but simply because here is an absolutely lovely, barely populated part of the world rarely thought of in terms of tourism. (“When Northerners come down to Georgia, they all go to Savannah,” one Georgian will later admit. “It’s got a lot more history. And a lot more good places to eat.”)

Every dam, tunnel, plaza, intersection, and geographic feature in Georgia seems to have a grand name. We’ve taken the Glenn Gooch Bypass to Brasstown Bald Mountain, and now we’re on the Richard Russell Memorial Highway toward Helen. In fact, it’s just a two-lane back road, but a lovely one—through an idyllic little valley which is appealing enough that we drive nearly to yesterday’s Helen, do a 180, and backtrack.

The Bird’s biggest challenge yet is State Road 180 from Vogel State Park to Suches, a twisty little road that climbs a leafy ridge and descends the other side. There are 75 turns in seven and a half miles, 3 of them major hairpins, according to the Porsche Club of America, which also calls the motoring here “some of the best east of the Mississippi”—high praise indeed from picky Porsche drivers. Those of us who live in the Snow Belt forget what it’s like to drive on carpet-smooth two-lanes that have never seen a frost heave or a winter-wrought pothole.

“You know you’re a redneck when your RV is bigger than your house,” observes my co-pilot as we pass exactly such a scene. Far more surprising is the other end of the lodging spectrum, which we come upon at the end of the afternoon at Barnsley Gardens, near Adairsville. The Cloisters, on Sea Island, may outweigh Barnsley Gardens on the stuffiness scale, but if there’s a more cosseting, lovely, magnificent, and unusual resort in all of Georgia, I sure don’t know where to find it.

The gardens once surrounded a grand brick manor built in the 1850s by cotton merchant Godfrey Barnsley. They’ve been restored, but the manor remains a ruin. The Civil War dispensed with Barnsley’s livelihood before his great house was completed, and then the estate was trampled by Sherman’s march to the sea. Whatever remained was finished off by a tornado that hit in 1906. But never mind, we won’t be sleeping here anyway. Guest accommodations are in 33 neat, compulsively detailed cottages of widely varying size but coolly complementary style. Barnsley Gardens sprang to life as a resort only in 1995, and looks like somebody’s dream of a dollhouse country village, albeit with Barbie’s Bahama-blue T-Bird parked just off the main street. That somebody is the resort’s owner, Bavarian prince Hubertus Fugger. His wife, Princess Alexandra—I’m not making this up—is a former National Geographic photographer, and her photos, as well as back issues, adorn the cottages’ walls and coffee tables.

Barely 60 miles to the southeast is Atlanta and those commuter traffic jams, but here in the red-clay country of north Georgia, we find ourselves in a still world of quilts and kudzu, southern pine and mountain laurel, in a garden ruled by a prince and princess. The new T-Bird will take you places you’ve never dreamed of, indeed.