back from atlanta and other mundane nonsense

we got back from our atlanta trip at 9pm on monday night. this week has been spent putting everything back where it goes, getting re-acquainted with MissM, and with the guy finishing out the school year on all fronts.

I liked NC and GA a lot. The people were very friendly and honestly happy to be helpful and the weather was perfect. The day we got to atlanta, I toured centennial olympic park and the underground. We got there in the afternoon/evening, so there wasn't too much for me to do. The first full day I took a self-paced walking civil rights tour of Atl guided by a print-out provided by an online travel site.

I saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's childhood home, his church, the new church, the park service memorial and garden, the tomb (awesome!), the center for non-violence, the fire station, bought a snack from the old church's bake sale, visited the dobb's memorial, saw the SCLC center and many other things. I also took a swim by the pool. Many people brought their entire families along on the trip and it was popular for the adults to spend a full 8 hours n the conference whilst leaving their young children unattended at the pool all day. The kids were not bad, but it was crowded, loud, and full of un-watched children, so the one visit to the pool was plenty.

thenext day I took the car out of the valet parking after 45 mins of playing "no that's not my name, no that's not my car, no that's not my car either, no it's a blue car, no we're from Maryland...." Thankfully, I was afraid of complications with the valet parking and with my ability to find my way to the beltway etc., so I'd planed on leaving an hour early for my appointment. After all the fuss, I made it just in time and all was well. After my meeting, I went back to the hotel, changed and went off to the Peachtree MARTA stop to go uptown a bit and see the Margaret Mitchell "House" museum and then walked over to the botanical gardens and piedmont park. I liked the statue "Isobel in the Garden" so much, i bought the post card of it at the gift shop and mailed it to MissM. I also mailed post cards of pitcher plants to my inlaws (they love pitcher plants and irises to my parents (they love irises and have about a hundred bulbs in one tiny patch of the front yard). You can find a picture of "Isobel..." at the Atl botanical gardens website under art. it really is a lovely garden.

It was a nice trip uptown and back to peachtree center to the hotel, and since I went on saturday, there were few people to contend with. I had lunch at peachtree mall and got carry out there for later when my guy was done his day of meetings. I also took time to work out in the gym at the hotel. the hotel had an awesome gym and nice tight men to look at while working out. I don't mind running for an hour if there's a good view. My guy was unable to go out a lot in the evenings due to PhD coursework. Last week was not only his conference, but the last week of his internship. This week he completes the last of his coursework for the PhD and is about to take on Comps. I am so happy for and proud of him. We've been having fun debating his proposal and dissertation topic. He seems happy that i'm one of 8 people in the world who has an interest in his topic.

Sunday am I took care of all the packing, depositing the luggage in to the car and check out. I was ill on Sunday and just getting out of bed took a lot of praying. The hotel kept the car until 5pm w/o extra charge, so we'd planned to walk over to the aquarium and see that before leaving. While waiting for my guy's conference to end, I walked around "america's mart" to look at the window displays and to take a few pics of things I hadn't taken pics of before, like the Suntrust Center etc. I thought walking around would keep me upright, and it helped.

The aquarium is nice. It's very large, they're not kidding that it's the largest. I don't think it's the nicest one I've been in though. They had many large tanks with a small handful of large animals in them, but all-in-all, one can see 95% of the aquarium in about an hour. Other aquariums are smaller, but since there are more tanks, there's more to see. It's worth the nearly $30 a person to get in, but at $1.50 for one banana, I'd skip the "snack bar" and just eat after the tour. We did not visit the "world of coke," CNN, stone mountain, the children's museum, or the zoo, due to time and lack of a small child. If we ever come back and have the kid, we'll do those other things.

The only harsh point of the trip was sitting on 85N for 4 hours trying to drive 4miles from the GA line into SC. A tractor trailer full of gas had exploded halting all travel. I am not sure if the driver survived, but his entire truck, cab and all, was in tiny ribbons all over the road, so it's doubtful. this put us behind schedule to get home and we made it to our hotel in NC at midnight.

The drive from the hotel in NC to home takes about 8 hours, so my guy insisted about 75 times that we leave before 9am when we went to bed. My guy is not a morning person, so when 9am rolled around and I was sitting there waiting for him to roll out of bed, I knew we'd be lucky to make it out of the hotel by 10:30am. We left at 10:38 am. We were both tired of being anywhere but home at this point. We made it to quantico, VA at about 5:20ish and stopped for a meal at a mcD's to wait for the traffic on the DC beltway to die down. It was pretty much an expensive parking lot and neither of us had the ability to tackle it.

I have a lot of pictures to post on FB and some here, but i'm waiting for the big PC to come back from the fix-it shop before i upload.

A few days before we left for Atl, my aunt took me, my mom, her sisters, and her daughter and one of my cousins and his wife to see Kenny Chesney and friends in concert at redskins FedEx field in landover, MD. It was a great show and she's a wonderful lady to take us all and put up with us too boot. I wasn't originally invited, so it's even more special that when one of my other aunts backed out, she thought of me.

oh i also got new glasses last week. I allowed MissM to pick them out. They're a blueish green with butterflies on them. I really didn't care too much what they looked like and she really liked picking, so we had as much fun as you can have picking out glasses. I can't wait for them to come in b/c i'm not supposed to drive at night w/o them.

next week is full of camping in the back yard, going to the doctor with MissM and continuing to pick tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and cheer on the squash. Oh and I think her first piano lesson is next week, if she feels up to it after the doctor apt on wed.

tomorrow my mom and I are having a picnic at a park for my dad for father's day. It'll be them, me, MissM and a few of my cousin's kids to play with missM and we'll probably just get subway and take it to the park. no one felt like doing much of anything, and that's about as low-key as you can get.