Atlanta-venture

Not the best pun, but this blog is a WIP...Today we stepped out of our comfort zone and took a family trip (minus Isabelle and the cats) to Atlanta. This morning was the Peachtree Road Race, the largest race in the US, 55K people run it. We did not know those statistics before planning to attend, we just wanted to see our good friend Tamara from Ames finish the 10k race and hang out with her. Max and I used our combined 53 years of education to plan how to use the MARTA system to travel from just north of the airport to Midtown where the race finished-we did a pretty good job as the most tense moment we had was trying to find a parking spot at the park &ride College Park Station.

We were a little overwhelmed when we got to Midtown with the number of people and route we had to walk to find Tamara. Nearly an hour late from the agreed upon time we found Tamara and her friends under the H ballon (I thought she had picked for Henry but this morning realized it might be H for Hancock (her last name)). It was a beautiful, cool for GA day and we were able to walk and talk and just enjoy the Midtown neighborhood...we took MARTA to Little Five Points and ate lunch at this cool corner pub. Henry was loving it. He hadn't seen Tamara in ages and just kept smiling at her. I had a fanstatic IPA that was high gravity and chocolate from a dish held by a Buddha outside the ladies room. It was fantastic to hang out with Tamara and her soon-to-be lawyer friend, Haley, who is moving to Little Five points soon.

If you were unaware, Atlanta has a some water resource issues-there is just not enough of it to keep up with demand and growth. I now understand why there is such growth-because Atlanta is cool, beautiful, and unique. I was again surprised (my prejudices are many) by how much I like Atlanta. I can understand why the Olympic Committee said yes. Plenty of cool neighborhoods, clean streets and parks. I would have to give Atlanta an A+ based on that experience (to give you a baseline, other large cities I have visited and graded Boston-A-, Pittsburgh was a B+, San Francisco C-, Seattle-A) We are definitely going back soon, only wish Tamara was going to be there.