Trip 03: Atlanta, Georgia... and travel!

A cross-country flight early in the morning saw me arriving in Atlanta, Georgia by early evening their time, all ready for the start of my longest trip in June.

I have absolutely no idea what mountain this is - Rainer, maybe?  It was early in the flight across the country.

I flew into town the day before our event, so it turned out that I didn't have a chance to see much of the city beyond the parking lot we had our event in.  Still, you get just such a sense of history out there - we were chatting with our waiter at dinner that first night, and he told us about some of the houses in his neighborhood, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's father had preached, and stories of the Underground Railroad.  I really regretted not being able to see more of the city, but it turned out that our event was in a pretty cool parking lot... Well, as cool as parking lots can get!

We were just across the street from Turner Field, where the Atlanta Braves play.  The day before I flew in, my coworkers J and D actually went to the parking lot to scope out the site and decided to go to a Braves game on a whim... and tickets were only a dollar!  We were marveling that to park right in front of the stadium in the very first lot only cost $12.  Try getting that price in Seattle or San Diego anywhere within a mile of a major stadium!  But alas, the rest of us missed out on baseball.

Turner Field.

The other neat thing that we could see from our parking lot was at the end of the street: the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Park.  We were right by the archways leading into the park, and could see the old tower where the torch was displayed.  I remembered seeing it on tv back in 1996, so it was pretty cool to see live!

If you squint, you can totally see the torch tower...

Atlanta wound up being even hotter than Tampa, and even more humid.  We were in the parking lot for the morning, and had to be out by 2 in the afternoon as there was a baseball game that night.  We'd decided that our goal would be to try to pack up everything after the event finished at noon in record speed, so that we'd have time to walk across the street to see the old baseball stadium (they had the old walls up, and markers where the bases had been) and down the street into the old Olympic Park.  But media showed up late, so we didn't even get to start packing up until after 1pm... so much for that plan!

The sun came up at about 6am... and it started getting hot at about 6am!  Coincidence?

This was the first event where we really noticed the effect of the heat and humidity.  We had those little neckerchief things that you soak in water to help cool yourself down, and boy, did those feel good for five minutes!  Still, at the end of the afternoon, the effects of the heat were really slowing us down.  We were being good and downing water and trying to keep ourselves cool, but as we were finishing up, it was almost comical how slow we were all thinking.  The entire trailer was loaded up except for a few last-minute things (coolers and inflatable pool toys, among others) which usually just get wedged in where there's room at the end of things.  This time, we all kind of stared at them for a while before we remembered what we were supposed to do with them!

I wrote in my journal: News reports put it at 93 degrees, but the car read 101 degrees - it sure felt like it!  I finished 5 bottles of water and a Gatorade by 10am, and just kept chugging the rest of the day.

How to tell it was really, really hot out... this is what I look like after packing up an event!
Such a glorious tan line from the neck of my uniform shirt...

Needless to say, we didn't have time to explore the area, which was a bit of a bummer.  On the other hand, we were all really grateful for the air conditioned vehicles!

We left directly from the parking lot in Atlanta, heading north for our next event in Philadelphia.  Because of laws about how long we could drive the trailer, we knew that we could only stay on the road for a few hours.  We were hoping to make it to Charlotte, North Carolina, but between a stop at Starbucks (seriously, our crew is so obviously from Seattle: it seems like we can't go a day without finding a Starbucks for coffee!), a weigh station, and a gas stop, we only made it to Greenville, South Carolina.  Each stop only made us more grateful for the AC in the cars... man, it was hot and humid!  My coworker S's glasses actually fogged every time he stepped out of the air-conditioned Tahoe, it was so humid.  In my journal I noted that each time you open the car door you just feel the heat like a brick to your face.  It's impressive.

We got to stay at the Hilton in Greenville... living it large!  Plus, because the company books so many rooms a year, our rooms were all bumped up to nicer rooms.  This means I stayed overnight in a corner room with floor to ceiling windows on two walls and a king bed.  Pretty swanky for a girl who'd never even had her own hotel room until that first Ephrata trip last month...

I am my father's daughter: I take pictures of my hotel rooms.

It was such a relief to be in an air-conditioned environment... and one with a shower!  I'd sweated so much from the heat that there was actually dried salt on my skin.  We met up after everyone had showered for a much-needed dinner - most of us rewarded ourselves with steak and potatoes after such a long, hard day of work and travel!

The next day we packed up and hoped to make it into Philadelphia.  However, since we're traveling with a trailer, the trailer drivers are subject to all the laws commercial vehicles must obey, among them being one that restricts the people driving to just eleven hours of driving out of a fourteen hour day.  Between the hour limit, some traffic in Baltimore, and the trailer not being allowed on the parkway, we didn't manage to reach Pennsylvania that day either - we wound up scrambling a bit for a hotel where we had to stop due to time, and spent the night in White Marsh just outside of Baltimore.  It made for a long day, with a bit of stress trying to find a non-booked-full hotel at the end of the day when we realized we weren't going to make it to Philly.  We had a late, exhausted dinner with everyone too tired to talk much, but the day was brightened (pun intended!) on the drive home.  I got to see FIREFLIES!

I know, I know, but come on, we don't have those out West. 

On the third day we did manage to finally make it into Philadelphia, making Pennsylvania the sixth state of this leg of the trip!

Entering the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel.

The drive was, overall, really not that bad despite the fact that it stretched longer than any of us had planned.  I'm not yet qualified to drive the trailer, so I only took my rotation driving the Tahoe.  I rode almost the whole trip with S and D in the Tahoe... and both of them are ex-cops, so I heard all sorts of stories and learned tons of new acronyms on the drive up!  We also listened to XM radio, which I'd never experienced before.  Both of my co-workers are about Dad's age, and they found a station that had all the music that I'm sure Dad would just love listening to and made me think of him the whole way up.

See?  Green!

The drive was really pretty.  It was a divided freeway almost the whole way up, two lanes on each side with a big grass median and a ton of trees and rolling hills as far as the eye can see on either side of the road.  Going through as many states as we did, we noticed that North Carolina takes far better care of their roads than the other states - they had far less potholes and had really pretty yellow and orange flowers (that were hardy enough to survive the heat!) alongside almost every exit.

What really surprised me about the drive, though, was just how green and isolated everything was.  The sides of the road are literally so tree-lined that you can't see through the treeline more than ten or twenty feet - all you can see is forest, and beyond that just rolling hills and more forest.  I always assumed that everything "back East" would be settled land: old farms and towns, roads everywhere, cities sprawling out with all the people that had to move West to escape the crushing population and spreading industry.  But there was a lot of completely unused land... literally just green hills as far as I could see in either direction, with exits few and far between and what was off of those exits fairly small and unassuming.  

I always assumed that pretty much everything East of the Appalachians (or, well, the Mississippi) was all old, settled land, full of people and with every square mile claimed, and this was the real impetus for the push West in the 1800s.  Not that I mind being proved wrong, mind you, it was just funny to see all my preconceived notions of the East vanish into hills and hills covered in trees!

I also kept a fairly impressive list of things we passed that I wanted to  do more research on - mainly historical sites, but every now and then we would pass a place that I didn't know too much about, so it made it onto the list.  Expect to see more about this later!

And with that, I will leave off with us arriving into Philadelphia, city of history, really big malls, cheese steaks, and 97% humidity (not kidding).  More to come next time!

States Traveled To So Far: 8 (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania)  (We were across the river from New Jersey, but I wasn't actually in it, so I'm not counting just seeing the state in this list... just states I was actually in!)

-Beth