Hotlanta!

Family Summer Vacation, June 18-21, 2009

This summer, we spent four days in Atlanta, GA for our family trip. Man, was it hot!! We still had a great time though! The three of us travel very well together. We're all pretty flexible, as long as I have some sort of idea of a semi-plan. :-)

Thursday morning we left early to make a 10:00 am tour of the CNN Center. I had been with my family as a kid and remembered thinking it was pretty cool. One of the great things about Cole is his desire to learn. He wants to understand how things work. So once we started exploring how the news gets produced, he was hooked! Loved every bit of it! Plus he got to ride a really cool escalator into a globe . . .

After the CNN tour, we headed across the street to Olympic Park for a picnic lunch. They have live music in the summer on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the park's amphitheater. We ate our sandwiches and threw the frisbee while the band played and kids danced in the fountains. It just felt good.


After lunch, we walked to the other end of the park to the World of Coca-Cola museum. Such a cool place! I remembered this too from when I was a kid. But back then, the building was by Underground and it had this really cool tasting room where a machine would shoot Coke in a perfect arch into your cup. Not anymore. Now the tasting room has 5 drink stations with various types of sodas from different regions of the world!

Tasting Room

After Coke, we walked through Underground - not much to see there. However, they do have a Rita's. I first heard about Rita's when I visited my friend Marci back when she lived in Maryland. They raved about Rita's and took me to get my first Gelati - combo of Italian Ice and Frozen Custard. Mmmm! Rumor has it we're getting a couple in Birmingham this summer!

So, we ate at Johnny Rocket's, got some Gelati at Rita's, took a photo on the brick train outside, prayed with a homeless man, then headed north to our hotel.



After an evening of swimming, we put Cole to bed. Now, when we travel and stay in a hotel, Brice and I put Cole to bed and then go down to the hotel lobby while he's falling asleep. There, in the midst of the tables and chairs, you will find us in fierce competition. Phase 10 is a trip favorite but this year we had Super Racko too! It was brutal. Chairs were flying, juice was spilled, tables were broken - ok, not really, but it was nightly competitive fun!

Friday we slept in then headed to Stone Mountain. The biggest hit there - the Sky Hike! It's a three-level ropes adventure course. There are several sections for you to cross, safely harnessed and attached to the top railing, of course! Cole started out nervous, but as soon as he got out there, he wanted to do it all!





We also decided to Ride the Ducks! We took a tour of the park in an old land/water military vehicle. We went out on the lake where the kids on the "boat" could drive a little bit. Capt. Bill was lots of fun! Everyone was given quackers which made remarkably real duck sounds. I'm betting most of them disappeared before families made it to the car for their journies home!

We had a lot of fun in the park - watching the 4D Journey to the Center of the Earth, playing mini golf, watching a glassblower, walking the ropes again. And of course, watching the Lasershow Spectacular! Here's Cole with the Campfire Stories storyteller (he was great) and a worker named Andrew!

Saturday we drove up to Dawsonville to the Kangaroo Conservation Center. SO FUN! It is the largest kangaroo collection outside of Australia. Located on 87 acres, there are hundreds of kangaroos, some wallabies, and various Aussie species of birds and lizards. We took a tour through the park and the kangaroos would just stop and stare at us. It was HOT so they mostly hung out under trees. And we saw a few joeys popping out of their pouch! Beautiful place!

There was a boomerang demonstration and "lesson" where everyone could try a throw.

And they have a "pet" deer! I've never pet a deer before! It was really cool. She wasn't scared of us at all. And if you look closely at her tummy, you can see that she's pregnant!

That Sunday was Father's Day so Dad got to make the choices that day. We were planning to play some mini-golf before hitting the road, but it was so jokin' hot that Brice called it off - and we were ok with that! We ate lunch at the same restaurant where we'd had dinner the night before: Max & Erma's. Dads ate free! And as seen below, the Jackson competitive spirit is being passed down to the next generation - they are in a heated dot-to-dot game.

Recap: fun trip, it was hot, good times, it was hot, made some memories, and it was hot!