Day 206 was a lot of driving. While we had arrived in Georgia the night prior, we still had a long, long drive to get to Atlanta. We arrived in the early evening at a park in East Atlanta, in what seemed like a really nice and safe neighborhood. There were young kids running around, older teenage kids playing basketball, families walking their babies in strollers. In what was perhaps the most amusing sight, Lisette saw not 1, not 2, but THREE people reading physical books! It's become an oddity, with a recent study discovering that reading among Americans for fun has dropped by 40% over the last 20 years.
There were a few mosquitoes that came out in the evening (which of course found and bit Lisette before she even realized), but other than that we had a quiet and peaceful night. The temperatures drop to much cooler numbers in the evening to the following morning (mid-teens overnight and still high twenties during the day in Celsius), and it looks like that will be the trend moving forward, as we continue north and progress into autumn. Hurray for a pleasant night's sleep!
Day 207: Atlanta, Day 1 (and Hi April!)
After a leisurely morning, we left the lovely park, heading to...another park! The Milledge Fountain is an elaborate fountain that was built in 1927, and likely the city's oldest fountain in the city's oldest park, Grant Park. Apparently the fountain spouts different colored water for special occasions, such as pink on Valentine's Day, and green on St. Patrick's Day). While Sheila had had a brief walk at the park we slept next to overnight, it was lovely to walk around the sprawling grounds of Grant Park, where the midmorning weather was still somewhat cool before the day reached its maximum temperature later in the afternoon.
We arrived downtown, seeing the Georgia Capitol Building with its gleaming golden dome, and statues of significant historical people including Martin Luther King on the lawn. Further along there are several stadiums, including the Mercedez-Benz Stadium (home to the Atlanta Falcons, its professional football team), the State Farm Arena (home to the Atlanta Hawks national basketball team). There wasn't really anywhere for our huge RV to park, but we found a spot in a quiet, adjacent neighborhood called Vine City, where we unlocked one of the eBikes and cycled back to see these sights, including the attractive, soaring City Hall building nearby.
World of Coca-Cola
We sped back to the RV after this quick tour, getting Sheila and walking towards the World of Coca-Cola, where we planned to meet our friend April and her daughter, who we haven't seen for over a decade! April lived briefly in San Francisco back in 2013, and realizing that we were traveling around the country, April reconnected with Lisette and we arranged to catch up while we were in town. While a lot of time has passed, we were so excited to catch up, and were very grateful for the opportunity to reconnect and for April and her family's hospitality!
We met April and her daughter outside the entrance of the World of Coca-Cola, a popular attraction in Atlanta dedicated to the history and cultural significance of the world's most famous drink. There's a brief intro to the museum before entering a small theater to watch an intro to Coca-Cola (well, basically an extended commercial), before we wandered through a few exhibits to learn about the history of the drink. Just like Dr. Pepper (we had visited this museum in Waco, Texas), Coca-Cola's recipe was also concocted by a pharmacist, John Pemberton.
The museum is very interactive, with a quiz testing visitor's knowledge of Coca-Cola (we failed, we didn't spend a lot of time reading the exhibits), as well as an opportunity to "design" your own drink resulting in a recommendation of what drinks to try in the tasting center. Smell is a big part of a soft drink's development, so we also got to test our olfactory sense to see if we could accurately guess certain scents (pumpkin spice was very subtle and nobody was able to immediately sniff that out). There was also an exhibit that took a photo of you, using AI to generate it into an image of you from the early 1900s as a journalist or athlete. We each had a photo taken of us, and we all agreed that they looked nothing like us! Although the photos it was generating of other people seemed to resemble them, although maybe they'd disagree as well.
One of the most popular sections of the museum was an area where people could try as many drinks under the Coca-Cola family as they desired, from all over the world. There were literally hundreds of flavors, including a honey-infused tea from Indonesia, a soda from Madagascar called "Bonbon Anglais", an apple and kiwi-flavored Sprite from Thailand and many others, from countries including Uganda, Moldova, the Philippines, and many more! The most confounding soda we tried was definitely a "sour plum" flavored one from China, which smelled and tasted like barbecue sauce. A definitely no from all of us!
Home of the 1996 Olympics and Traffic
After visiting the World of Coca-Cola Museum, we walked to the nearby Centennial Olympic Park, which still has remnants from when Atlanta hosted the summer Olympics in 1996, with massive sculptures of athletes, names of athletes inscribed into blocks who won medals at the games, and torches. And of course, a sculpture of the Olympic rings.
It was around 3.30pm, and we needed to head to Suwanee, about 30 miles north of Atlanta, to April's home, so we left as apparently traffic is notoriously bad around Atlanta. And yep, we were in a ton of congestion, with the drive taking about an hour and a half! While some cities we've been to have seemed practically empty (where are the office workers?), clearly this is the exact opposite in Atlanta. It is bumper-to-bumper gridlock, and Michael definitely got to apply his driving skills on the highway, having to cut across 5 lanes of traffic at some points to exit the highway to get to another. With so many cars on the road, we definitely encountered a lot of impatient and cranky drivers, culminating in several road accidents that only made the traffic worse.
On the way to April's place, we picked up dinner from Gu Thai--despite our love of Thai food, we had surprisingly not had any Thai cuisine since Utah (months ago)! Since we are in a big city, we knew there would be a few Thai restaurant options, and the food here did not disappoint, including the massaman curry to the Pad Kra Pow (minced chicken with basil) stir fry. They aren't heavy-handed on the spice, so we could have gone up one extra notch with our orders.
We also met April's husband, Rob (although we missed his rendition of Johnny B. Goode when we visited--maybe next time 😉 ??), and Munchie, their energetic dog. She was eager to meet and play with Sheila, although it took a while for Sheila to warm up to Munchie, particularly as her last dog interaction was an aggressive attack a mere couple of days ago. But they eventually got to know each other and (to our relief), became comfortable with each other in the course of the evening.
Dinner was absolutely lovely, April and Rob's house is gorgeous and so homely, and we are so grateful for the hospitality and the chance to catch up again after so long. Also: thank you for letting us use your spacious shower, so luxurious compared to the "splash and dash" rationed water showers in the confined space in our RV!
Day 208: Atlanta Highlights
The next morning, we took our time to get ready (we are going to be really late, still not yet on US Eastern Time), so while we were able to get up early enough to say hi to our friends before they left for work and school, we weren't fully alert for another couple of hours (Lisette admits that she clambered back into bed). But it also meant that we got some errands done, and Sheila and Munchie had ample time to play in the morning before we drove back to Atlanta around lunchtime, fortunately missing the rush hour traffic that we encountered the evening prior.
We went to Swan House first, a mansion built in 1928 that is currently part of the Atlanta History Center, and has been featured in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2. We didn't get tickets for the History Center, so our view of the House was from the street and through the gates, but even from a distance we could see how impressive the mansion was--it seemed to have jumped out of the pages of a Jane Austen novel, perhaps like Mr. Darcy's "Pemberley" estate in "Pride and Prejudice." The whole neighborhood was lined with equally grand old mansions, clearly very historic and very expensive!
Jim Henson's Puppets
We next arrived at the Center for Puppetry Arts, which is the largest center in the country focused on puppetry. We'd been to the ventriloquist museum in Kentucky, similar but different! Tickets were $16.50 per adult, with additional cost to see the daily live shows (which we didn't see).
The museum has been open since 1978, when Jim Henson cut the ceremonial ribbon with Kermit the Frog. It focuses a lot on Jim Henson's puppets, which was awesome to travel down memory lane and see the beloved pupepts from Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, and other Jim Henson shows. Of course Kermit was there, as well as Miss Piggy, Grover, Big Bird, and many others. It detailed the history of Jim Henson, his wife Jane, and his team's work in creating muppets over the years, and showed how many puppets evolved over the years, becoming less of a "sock puppet" look to a more intricate design with facial features moving via remote controls.
Additionally, there's a separate exhibit that shows the history of puppets from around the world, including puppets from China, Japan, India, Mali, Italy, France, England and other countries. It was cool to see the cultural differences in the puppets--from marionettes, shadow puppets, and other with traditional costumes and stories behind them. It's not a big museum, but it's filled with lots of adorable puppet creatures that made it a worthwhile visit.
Driving Around Atlanta
Since parking and navigating around Atlanta proved to be challenging, we figured we'd see as much of the city as we could, with some sights being more drive-bys than actual stops. We drove across the Atlanta Pride Crosswalk, an intersection with rainbow colors in support of the LGBTQIA+ community. Further along, we whizzed past the front of the Plaza Theatre, which opened in 1939 and is one of the city's longest-operating independent movie theaters.
In the Little Five Points neighborhood, within a parking lot with a small number of shops, we saw the photorealistic mural of the rap duo from OutKast, who both hail from Atlanta. There are a number of other cool murals in the area, including one of Agnes Senesie, a farmer from Sierra Leone, whose products are sold in the natural food store where the mural appears.
In the Inman neighborhood not too far away is a curious oddity that, had we not known what it was, we'd likely have thought was an old phone booth of some sort. There's no plaque indicating what it was, but it's a one-person jail cell, the last remaining of 4 that were spread across the city between 1890-1905. The cells were used for police officers to put drunks and petty offenders in until the horse carriage arrived to cart them to jail, until these cells were deemed inhumane to put people in as a secondary holding cell. We'd seen a two-person jail cell in Illinois, and this one is just as quirky!
There was a place for us to leave the RV (and Sheila) for a bit across from the cell, so we opted to share one eBike to visit Krog Street Tunnel, an underpass that connects the Inman Park and Cabbagetown neighborhoods. What's interesting about this tunnel is that it's filled with ever-changing artwork (and graffiti), so every visit will be totally different (in fact, there were people spray painting when we got there). It's filled with a lot of spray paint and graffiti tags, versus detailed murals, which makes sense knowing that the art is painted over constantly.
We'd seen a few historic places related to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including where he was tragically assassinated at the Lorraine Museum in Memphis. We now saw his birth home in the historic Auburn Avenue district, once known as the "Black Business District" as it was a hub for African American middle and upper class families. MLK lived here for the first 12 years of his life, but unfortunately his home is undergoing renovations, so we couldn't see inside it. Tours are free and are on a first-come, first-served basis.
Our Final Dinner in Atlanta
Since we had a traffic-laden drive back to Suwanee, we headed back, with the drive taking over 1.5 hours return. Despite having 5 lanes all heading in one direction on the highway, traffic here is something else! It would be horrible to have to commute and be stuck in traffic jams everyday... we'll happily pass, thanks! Unsurprisingly, the traffic makes people drive aggressively, and we witnessed no less than 3 car crashes on the drive back.
We were the first ones to get back to April's house, which gave Sheila and Munchie some play time. Well, Munchie wanted to play, while Sheila continued to do her own thing. But at least they are now more familiar with each other and hang out! Soon afterwards, Rob came home, followed by April and Estelle. Dinner was a lovely meal of roasted chicken, roasted vegetables and rice. Lisette used to roast vegetables all the time when we were living in a house, but it's been very rare for us to eat them as it's been too hot recently, but we've also not had an oven! Lisette finished off all the leftover vegetables and we'll definitely seek out roasted mushrooms, onions, zucchini, and other veggies as the weather gets cooler!
Time flew as we chatted after dinner, and we could have hung out for longer had tomorrow not been a weekday with school and work. How wonderful to reconnect with April on this part of our trip, and meet Rob and Estelle too! It's always so nice to meet with friends, realize how easy it can be to catch up again despite the years since we last met, and hope that our next meeting won't be as long next time!