Hotlanta Part 2

We woke up a little earlier today, showered, took advantage of the free breakfast at the hotel, and we were on our way by 10:30.  We planned on having another touristy day today, with plans to go to the CNN center and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site.  Since rush hour was over with, traffic was not a problem.  We were in the city within a half hour and we found parking pretty quickly, paying only $5 for the day.  We walked over to the CNN center and bought tickets for the next available tour, which was about 40 minutes out, at 11:40.  We sat in the huge atrium just kind of hanging out while we waited for our tour.  We noticed, and this was later confirmed during the tour, that there is a hotel attached to this atrium, so when you look out the windows of your room you are looking down onto the food court of the CNN atrium.  The tour was a kind of behind the scenes look at how they do things at CNN.  The tour started by taking you up the world’s largest free standing escalator, which took us up 8 stories to the start of the tour.  They then showed us a few videos before taking us into a mock-up studio where they show you how a teleprompter and a green screen works (if you take a close look you will notice that weather reporters never wear green).  We then went to a glassed in area overlooking a large room where all the news research is done.  As it was explained to us, the people working here are constantly looking for news stories.  In the picture below you can see a few guys sitting behind a red desk, they are the supervisors who decide which news stories are big and which ones get shown first.  We noticed that no one had any personal effects on their desk (pictures, plants, etc).  This is because from time to time the news is broadcast live from this room.  We did get a short glimpse of a live broadcast with Nancy Grace.

After the CNN tour, we walked back out into the heat.  Apparently the all time high temperature for Atlanta for this day was 89 degrees and today’s forecast was 90.  We walked a few blocks towards downtown to grab a bottle opener from the Hard Rock Café.  On the fridge in our bar we collect Hard Rock café magnet/bottle openers.  We grab one whenever we are in a city with a Hard Rock Café.  These are kind of cool because each magnet has a unique design for the city that it comes from.  This particular café had two different styles, so we had to grab one of each.

After leaving the Hard Rock we walked back to the car so we could head over to the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic site.  Had it been a little cooler we probably could have walked over, but once we got there the parking was free and the a/c in the car felt really good.  They showed us a video on the Civil Rights movement and Dr. King’s life.  After checking out the visitor’s center we headed across the street to the grave of Dr. and Mrs. King, and then we checked out the Ebenezer Baptist Church where Dr. King served as pastor with his father.  The church has been restored to exactly what it looked like in the 1960s.

After leaving the MLK Historic Site we went and checked out a couple of virtual caches (geocaching.com) nearby.  The first was called “54 columns”.  This was essentially a bunch of concrete pillars of various heights which according to the sign, were meant to represent Atlanta’s skyline.  We then went to a cemetery where we visited Bobby Jones’s (famous golfer) grave as well as the grave of Margaret Mitchell (author of Gone With the Wind).   They also had a bar across the street called “Six Feet Under”.

Finally we planned on going to the Food Truck park again for dinner.  Luckily it was only a short distance away, maybe 5 minutes.  When we got there we were surprised to see that they were closed!  So instead of lots of different great street food we ate at Chick-fil-A, which is a fast food restaurant specializing in chicken.  On their cups they even have three cows holding up signs that say “Eat mor chikin”.  The chain is also known for promoting the company founder's Christian values and each and every restaurant (over 1600 of them) are closed on Sundays.  We didn’t really think anything of it yesterday, but in Turner Field we saw a Chick-fil-A restaurant that was closed.  Now we know why.

Finally, we headed to our hotel, for an early night for a change.

Tomorrow we will probably be camping so we may not get a chance to post.