A Weekend Away

First, in reverse chronological order, I just got back from being a guest speaker at my daughter's robotics class at school. It was pretty fun, and I think it went pretty well. Of course, the students might have a different opinion...

Now to the vacation. For a Christmas/anniversary present, my wife got me a gift card for something called Signature Days. They have various activities in a number of cities that you can do as a once-in-a-lifetime, or at least once-in-a-great-while experiences. A lot of cities have balloon rides, some have race car rides, and a few have fighter plane rides. There are also the spa/pampering kind of thing, but the more active things interested me. Well, I decided to take a biplane ride offered in Atlanta. So for fall break, we made a short vacation of it. We get to Atlanta later than I had expected. I swear there wasn't that much traffic the last time I took that route. And in Atlanta, the traffic was really bad. I found out later that there was some awards show kind of event downtown that probably accounted for some of the traffic. So we didn't get checked into the hotel until nearly 5:30. Now we had tickets to Medieval Times for 7:30 and they recommended we get there by 6:00. No way. The traffic was still just as bad as when we came in. We did get there by 7:00 though and that was fine. We had great seats. We were on the front row at the end opposite the king. Our knight threw my daughter a flower. That was the first day.

The second day was some sightseeing. We went to the World of Coke and the Aquarium. It was a pretty good aquarium, but the World of Coke interested me more. The tour actually went through a small bottling operation. It wasn't a lame fake factory like they had in Hershey. They were actually bottling Cokes. In fact at the end of the whole thing, they had souvenir bottles you could take. They were the bottles they were bottling on the tour. We also visited the room where they have various brands from across the world. I had thought from something on TV that you could sample every brand bottled by Coke, but it wasn't everything. They said there were 70 something drinks there, but I didn't see that many. Anyway, I did try about 10 or 15. There was this one from Italy called Beverly. The tour people all said everyone should try it, with an obvious implication that it was disgusting. Well, my wife tried it and hated it. Then at the next kiosk she learned that I hadn't tried it and insisted. I did, and actually I didn't think it was too bad. Not my favorite, but I didn't spit it out either.

Saturday was supposed to be my plane ride, but Fri night, I got a call from the guy that owns the operation and he said his pilot was sick and could I do it Sun. Sure, we'll just be later getting home. So Sat, we spent most of the afternoon at Stone Mountain. I had forgotten about the little "villiage" they have at the base. It's a lot like Silver Dollar City. In fact they're run by the same people. We took the skylift up the mountain and of course really loved it. The weather was perfect. I gave some thought to hiking back down, but decided to stay with the family.

Then came Sunday. The day for the event around which the whole vacation was scheduled. When the guy called, he said something about a voucher, and all I had gotten was a plastic card. Well, when the pilot came in from taking another rider, he said that's all he needed. Cool. Now we just have to fuel the plane and go have fun. So he tells me the best way to twist my body to get into the plane (front seat) and shows me the controls and gets me strapped in. Then he climbs in back and starts the engine. Well, he tries to start the engine. And tries, and tries, and tries. At first it seems to be flooded, but none of the normal flooding remedies seems to work. He starts talking about rescheduling all his flights for the day and I tell him that we've come from Memphis for this. So now he's determined to get us up in the air. So he decides that the problem is probably an overheated magneto and opens the cowling to let it cool off. That finally did the trick. After over half an hour of trying to start that engine, it finally fires. Now we can taxi to our runway and take off. It's been a while since I've been in a small plane at all, and I've never been able to ride an open plane like that one. It was fun. One thing about those. You can't see in front of you. So you see everything looking over the sides. We flew over the city highlighting a few sights. Then we flew out to Stone Mountain and got a good look at that. Then it was time to come back. Originally, he had said that he'd let me have the controls at some point, but that never ended up happening. I suspect that with the engine issues and the delay, he was more focused on getting back and getting his next appointment going. Anyway, it was a really fun vacation. I've put some pictures of it up on my web page here.