Atlanta
The World of Coca-Cola Museum had just
been refurbished when we visited Atlanta.
The best display, the all you can drink soda fountains with Coke
products from around the world, was still there but the old Flying Coke
display, where Coke was shot out of a spigot that you had to catch in your
glass, was not. It probably made too much of a mess to keep as a permanent
display. The best new attraction was the Coke Polar Bear. The
people who produced The Muppets designed this life-size animatronics bear; it
could move its eyelids, shift its neck in many different directions, and walk
like you would suppose a real bear would walk. Inside of the bear was a
computer, a camera, a television monitor, and a fan to keep the puppeteer cool.
It was an engineering marvel and it was the highlight of our visit to Atlanta
because we weren't expecting it. When we walked into the auditorium the
Coke Bear was seated off to the side and we thought that it was a statue
because it was sitting so still. The bear snuck up on us while we were
paying attention to a presentation, so my girls didn't realize that he was
right behind us, and they squealed with delight when they realized that the seven-foot
polar bear had come to life. Of course, we took many pictures, and I
framed the best of them we got back home, where they remain proudly
displayed.
After the Coke Museum, we went to the
Georgia Aquarium. There were all sorts of fish and tunnels made of glass
so you could see the fish from above and below the surface, and from all
sides. There were small pools where you could reach out and touch a starfish,
stingray, shark, and shrimp. The aquarium had four major sections but my
favorite was watching the Beluga whales. The whales were the size of a
small house and yet the pool that was built for them was so large that it
gave the whales more than enough freedom to roam. If the kids weren't
asking me to take them to get something to eat, I think that I could have
stayed all day at the floor to ceiling glass enclosed viewing area of the
whales
Baltimore
On our
way to Baltimore we stopped at Monticello, in Charlottesville, to see Thomas
Jefferson's estate. The kids were only mildly interested in the main
house but they did like the clock in the foyer, the dumb waiter in the kitchen,
and the automatic doors. We took a tour of the grounds but Virginia
became bored and started to dig up the dirt in the back yard where the slave
quarters used to be. She was only eleven at the time and said that there
weren't any slave cabins so we were looking at where everything used to be but
there was nothing there now, so she played in the dirt. The working farm
and the beauty of the mountaintop location did not impress her. We were
supposed to be at Monticello for the better part of the day but we stayed for
less than two hours.
As we continued our journey north we
decided to see the Smithsonian Air and Space Annex which is located near the
Dulles International Airport. The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the
atomic bomb, was of particular interest to me because I teach my U.S. history
and world history students about how WWII ended in the Pacific every school
year. My kids, however, weren't interested so we left after only an hour
and a half. I thought that all the exhibits on flight and the space
missions would take but since nothing stuck to them the better part of valor
would be to move on.
On the second day of our trip we drove
to Fort McHenry and learned about the War of 1812. They had a great video
on the war and some artifacts, including the star spangles flag display.
The balance of the day was spent at
Baltimore's Inner Harbor where there were enough shops and museums to make even
my hard to please children happy. The highlight of the day was the Duck
Tour, where the vehicle drove us through the streets of Baltimore and then our
guide drove it into the water to navigate the inner harbor. We were given
quackers, or duck call whistles, when we got on the boat and the tour guide
encouraged us to use them as loudly and as often as possible. I told the
girls, "As soon as we get off this duck I am taking away your quackers,"
and then I had to stop and check myself because I couldn't believe that
sentence came out of my mouth. Grant quickly became tired of the girls
doing duck calls and he coped by walking twenty feet in front of us and
pretended that he didn't know us. A fellow obnoxious tourist loudly said
to Grant, "Hey aren't you with them? Isn't that your
family?" Grant walked even further from us because now he was truly
embarrassed while the girls, being egged on by the obnoxious tourist, began to
blow on their duck calls even louder.
The Inner Harbor had other attractions
and we shared a ride in a paddle boat. However, all three kids were
arguing with each other over about the direction and speed that they were
going. All three got out of the boat, after a half hour ride, and were
complaining bitterly. I tried to distract them by moving onto the next
thing and asked them, "What do you want to do next?" Virginia
replied, "Let's do the paddle boats again!" Lillian responded
with, "Yeah, because that worked out so well the first time."
Her voice was dripping with sarcasm and, following her lead, we decided that
maybe we should stay off of the water for a while. Instead, we ate lunch
at the Hard Rock Cafe, visited an authentic lighthouse and a WWII submarine,
and rounded out the day with a tour of the USS Constellation.
Our final stopover was the United States
Naval Academy in Annapolis. I wanted to introduce my three children to
the military services and we had a great tour of the Academy. It was much
bigger than I expected it to be and our tour guide told us that the Naval
Academy had its own vocabulary: we were not on a campus but must refer to it as
the yard. The floor is referred to as the deck. The newly arrived
freshmen were not cadets, as they would be called at West Point, but were
plebes and everyone else was called Midshipmen. We saw the freshmen dorms
and a twenty-one-foot monument that was greased up by the upperclassmen and
then made the plebes climb up as part of their indoctrination to the Naval
Academy. We couldn't take a ride in the sailboats but the underclass men
were encouraged to take out a boat any time that they wanted because they
needed to strengthen their sailing skills. Finally, what made the
strongest impression was the pool that they used for training because it was
the best indoor pool that I had ever seen.
It was an Olympic size pool with a 30-foot diving platform and it was
all inside. I had never seen anything
like it and, as an avid swimmer, the pool alone made me want to attend the
Naval Academy.
Dallas
We only spent one day in Fort Worth and
we went to the old stockyards that had been turned into a Cow Town tourist
attraction. For the most part, the stockyards had been converted into a
shopping mall but it did have some interesting things for us to see.
There was a cattle maze for the kids to run through, a mechanical bull for the
kids to ride until they were thrown off, and we got to watch a cattle drive
that went ride through the middle of the street. It was fun because we
had never done anything like this before and I am sure that the kids will brag
to their friends about their trip to Cow Town.
While in Dallas we went to the Sixth
Floor Museum and looked out of the same window that Lee Harvey Oswald used to
shoot President Kennedy. They had all sorts of exhibits but the most
disturbing thing that we saw was the video on the assassination. It
showed Kennedy's head exploding in graphic detail and there was a large picture
of Jackie Kennedy with her husband's blood all over her dress. Usually
that part of the picture is cropped out and Virginia, especially, became
distressed watching the video and seeing the picture.
On the second day in Dallas we went to
the Heritage Village where the city had relocated a bunch of historical
buildings from the surrounding area and put them all into one place. My
daughters liked it because they could play inside the school, hotel, and train
station without being restricted by barrier ropes or over bearing tour
guides. We were given full access with our paid admission and, because it
was during the work week, we had the place virtually to ourselves
The highlight to our day in Little Rock
was visiting the Clinton Presidential Library, which was a lot bigger than I
thought and full of exhibits. They had a timeline of Clinton's two terms
in office and it included pictures, text, and videos throughout the
display. Many of the unusual and expensive gifts that Clinton received
while in office were on display and there was a reproduction of Clinton's Oval
Office and his cabinet room.
Memphis
Our first stop in Memphis was Graceland
and we knew that Elvis' mansion would be a tourist trap but we liked it any
way. His residence was much bigger than I expected and the curators kept
it exactly as Elvis had left it when he died in 1977. My children would
say that their favorite room was the Jungle Room because there was a ceramic
tiger and carpet on the ceiling. Outside of the mansion were Elvis'
airplanes, his cars, and a pasture where he kept his horses. In the back yard was his grave site and it
seemed a little out of place since we were celebrating Elvis’ life and would
prefer to forget about the way that he died.
One
major problem for us at the estate was that we were handed iPads to take
a self-guided tour. It was nice that
they had an auditory guide but there was no raised lettering on the
devices. We have been to other museums
where that gave us a hand held player with raised lettering, but the iPad is
smooth so my blind wife couldn’t work it.
I did my best to describe the mansion as we walked through it but Tracey
quickly grew irritated with the sound of my voice and, on top of the lack of
accommodations for the handicapped, we thought it best if we made a mostly
silent walk through Elvis Presley’s house.
On Friday
night we went out to eat at “Rendezvous,” which we were told is the best place
for ribs in Memphis. It was an old time
restaurant with pictures of famous people who had eaten there strategically
placed throughout the building. The
decor was a throwback to the 1950s. It
felt like we had transported ourselves back in time; the waiters wore white
shirts and black ties, the ribs were prepared from a time-honored recipe, and
the whole meal was exactly how we thought ribs in Memphis should be like.
We stayed
at a hotel located about a half block away from Beale Street so that Tracey and
the kids had easy access to the party district.
Since it was Labor Day Weekend, there was a free concert in the park and
I enjoyed leaning against the W.C. Handy statue, my face getting full sun on an
unseasonably warm late summer day, and listened to the jazz and blues. When the kids got bored, we took a tour of
the Gibson Guitar Factory and the Rock and Soul Museum, and then walked down to
the Mississippi River to see the new park that the city had just completed.
Tracey and
I turned in early but the kids saw the drunken night life on Beale. As the evening progressed the crowds became
too much for them because it became difficult to move, even in the middle of
the street. Virginia was offered a free
puppy if she would agree to go down a dark alley so that a sketchy photographer
could take her picture. Fortunately,
Virginia knows enough not to stray off the main path while visiting a strange
city, so she moved away from the photographer quickly. A little later Grant and Virginia became
stuck behind a couple of drunk girls on Beale.
The drunks could barely talk, much less walk in a straight line, and one
of the girls turned to her friend and slurred, “Sarah, look at me. Sarah, you are embarrassing yourself. Sarah!”
She repeated this over and over again for some time, apparently not
realizing that they were equally drunk and both were embarrassing themselves
with public intoxication. This isn’t
unusual on Beale Street, but it is still unseemly.
Gatorland, Disneyworld, St. Augustine
Virginia and I drove 2,100 over the Thanksgiving weekend to spend
some time with Lillian and Tanner. We drove through the night and arrived
in Orlando in time to spend two hours at Gatorland. For me, travel is all
about experiencing something new and we were able to take in a gator wrestling
show, something that I have never seen before, and we were enthralled as a
trainer flipped an alligator onto its back and then we watched to gator pass out.
Then the trainer put the gator back on its stomach and tickled it until
the gator woke back up. Cracking jokes throughout the whole presentation,
the trainer put his head into the gator's mouth, and then finished the day by
putting on a show called Gator Jump-A-Roo where the gators jumped out of the
water to snatch some dead chickens which were strung out on a wire.
On
Thanksgiving Day we went to Disneyworld's Animal Kingdom and we had a wonderful
time. The forecast was for an 80 percent chance of rain but we never saw
a drop but the crowds were thin because the locals stayed away because of the
predicted bad weather. Virginia and I started our day at the old section
and we had parts of the place virtually to ourselves. There was no line
at Mount Everest and Kali River so we did those rides twice in rapid
succession. The Tiger Trail was empty and when we made our way to the
viewing room, where there were no tourists, there was a massive Bengal tiger
staring at us through the window. Once he saw us walk in it was almost as
he had said to himself, "Well hello! I have been waiting for you.
Now that you're here I guess that I should go and start doing my tiger
stuff." We watched him get into his tiger pool and prance around the
huge cage. It was the highlight of my day.
After
having our Thanksgiving dinner at the Rain Forest Cafe, we went on the Mount
Kilimanjaro truck drive through the animal preserve. Rhinos nudged right
up to the side of the truck and we saw a baby elephant, covered in dirt,
jumping and playing with her sister. While on the truck we had an up
close view of lions and giraffes and cheetahs and it was wonderful. When
the tour was finally finished in the middle of the afternoon we decided to go
to the new Pandora section and do the Flight of Passage ride.
Unfortunately, we got stuck next to an old couple did nothing but
complain about the length of the wait time and, since one of the rides broke
down, we had to listen to the complaints for three hours. The Flight of
Passage was a cool 3D ride but it wasn't worth hearing the old couple trash
talk Disney for wasting their valuable time for a couple of hours.
On
the way to visit my eldest daughter, Lillian, in Jacksonville, my youngest
daughter and I decided to go to the Kennedy Space Center on Black Friday.
We took a bus front the visitor's center and drove to the launch pad
where the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo rockets took off. They had a huge
hanger that displayed an actual Saturn V rocket and Virginia was surprised at the
enormity of it. The rocket dwarfed us as we stood next to it. Back
at the visitor's center, we saw the Hall of Heroes which celebrated the early
space program pioneers like Glenn, Schirra, and Yeager.
Saturday
was dedicated to St. Augustine where we visited the Ripley's Believe It or Not
Museum. I thought that it was nothing but kitsch but the kids liked it
and we ended up spending almost the whole morning there. St. George
Street is the main tourist thoroughfare in the old section and we strolled
through it, enjoying the morning sun, and stopping for home made ice cream
before we got back into the car. We then drove to The Wild Reserve, a
private sanctuary, to see the rescue tigers and lions. The most memorable
part of our afternoon in the reserve was when the volunteers provoked the lions
and tigers into roaring and jumping. The tigers stood on their back legs,
using their front legs to press against the wire fence, and opening their
mouths so wide that we could clearly see their canine teeth pointing out,
trying to attack the volunteer. One tiger drew a bead on the little
children, looking at them like they were chicken nuggets and wanting nothing
more than to eat them. Another tiger was fed but wouldn't eat his lunch
until he had roared to warn us away so that he could give his meal his full
attention and not worry about the tourists interrupting him. The Wild
Reserve also featured rescued hyenas, a bear, and a bobcat but it was the lions
and tigers who made the deepest impression. The volunteers treated the
lions like big pet cats, and the lions ran up to the volunteers to be petted
and stroked.
Minneapolis
On
Monday we went to the Science Museum of Minnesota
On Tuesday we went to the Waterpark of
America is the largest indoor waterpark in the world.
On Wednesday we went to Camp Snoopy, or,
as it is now called, The Park at the Mall of America. It is an amusement
park inside of the largest mall in the world. It held two roller coasters
and a log flume.
The Biltmore
We spent the morning
