Atlanta and homeward bound

My mother and I went down for breakfast this morning while my wife stayed in our room with a slight hangover. While we were at the buffet selection a waitress approached and asked if we wanted tea of coffee. I said coffee and was trying to explain to her where we were sitting but she smiled and said she knew where we were seated and sure enough, by the time we returned with our breakfast, a pot of coffee was waiting for us. I guess it's not a hard thing to do, but that attentive and observant waitress impressed me a lot.

I was also very impressed with Johnathan at the concierge desk. He tried his best to get us on golf buggy tour of Atlanta but as it was fully booked up we walked to nearby Art Museum instead. I'd have really liked to try the buggy tour, but trying to book it fifteen minutes before it left wasn't really a viable option. 

The Art Museum wasn't really of much interest to us so we walked back to the Federal Reserve Bank Museum near our hotel. We had to go through strict airport style security to get in, which I thought was odd for a museum, but I then realised that it was actually a working federal reserve bank handling millions of dollars each day. There was an interesting exhibition on money through the ages, from simple bartering up to today's modern methods or payment and we were amused to see an 1800's Manx three legged coin displayed in the "unusual forms of currency" section. Like us, it was a long way from home.

When we went back to hotel Johnathon greeted us with a very welcome and refreshing cold drink and we retrieved our cases from the bell boy and the valet parking brought our car around to the main doors and helped us load the car. After tips all around we eased out into the heavy traffic to make our way to the airport. 

It was a horrible drive to airport in the heavy traffic and there was a lot of edging from one lane to another in order not to miss our various turns in the slow, densely packed traffic. We eventually made it to the Alamo returns drop off where we were checked and told we had driven a total of 1681 miles. From there it was a trip on the airport rail system back to the south terminal were our plane seemed to be leaving from. 

Check-in was a farce. We managed to "self" check in with help from an assistant and then had a separate line to check our hold luggage. This took ages as everyone in front of us seemed to have huge cases or too many cases. I couldn't help notice they were all the same ethnicity and wondered why they seems to think baggage allowances didn't apply to them. Some seemed to be trying to check two or three times the cases actually allowed. We also watched on with amusement and amazement as one huge and heavy case was laboriously loaded on to the scales by two passengers and they then had to unloaded a huge amount of clothes on to the floor to get the case down to the required weight. I didn't see what happened to all ow the clothes left on the floor as it was eventually our turn to check in out luggage, which took about one minute as we knew the rules and allowances. 

We went to the gate T7 where I had a burger, fries and a beer while we waited for out flight home. The flight itself was terrible, I was far too hot and couldn't get any sleep. On a previous British Airways home from the USA it was quite cold and a bottle of water at my feet had actually frozen during the flight but it seemed that Delta had the heat turned up full and I was wishing I was waring shorts and a t-shirt.

I was very glad  to land in a cool and breezy Manchester Airport where we had a couple of hours wait before our Flybe flight back home to the Isle of Man.

Birmingham to Atlanta

We had a buffet breakfast this morning which was situated on the top floor of hotel. There was a curious option of scrambled eggs with ham cubes mixed in to it; not much use to my vegetarian wife, but I really enjoyed it for a change so I was reasonably happy.

Before we left for Atlanta my mother and I went for a quick stroll in nearby park but I then noticed the adjacent courthouse and quite a few people lying or sitting around nearby, all seemingly eyeing me and my DSLR camera so we didn't linger long and we went back to the hotel to pack and checkout.

A far shorter drive than yesterday found us in Atlanta and we stopped at a shopping mall in Buckhead before going to the hotel. I went to Macy's and bought three more Tommy Bahama shirts. The short drive to our hotel took ages because of a minor shunt ahead and as I was getting anxious about our fuel level I turned the engine off during long waits to conserve some gas. We eventually made it to the hotel, which was on our left and on the "wrong" side of the road and due to the very heavy traffic I was glad to abandon the car to valet parking rather than self parking that I preferred.

The Atlanta Loews hotel is absolutely fantastic and although our rooms are on different floors my mother's room number was 1234, which was easy for her to remember, and our was 2626 on the top guest floor. There seems to be private apartments on floors above us. In the evening we had a meal in the hotel, washed down by a few drinks and some more drinks back in our room to get rid of our remaining supply of alcohol before we go to the airport tomorrow.

New Orleans to Birmingham

I hadn't been looking forward to today as it was the longest daily drive of our trip. After we'd packed, checked out and loaded the car we set off for the long haul to Birmingham. We'd initially decided on at least two stops during the five and a half hour drive, with maybe my wife taking a turn at the driving, but in the end I did all the driving with just the one stop for something to eat and drink and to refuel the car.

As we'd already paid for a tank of fuel in the rental price I didn't want to return it with a lot of fuel in the tank so we did some calculations and I put in enough to see us back to the rental depot at the airport. After we'd checked in to our hotel in Birmingham we drove to a nearby mall where the women looked at various clothes and cosmetic shops and I bought a Tommy Bahama shirt in Macy's. I'd heard Scott Bourne going on about these shirts being his favourite, and as I'm of similar stature (short and fat) I decided to get one.  

We had our evening meal back at our hotel. This turned out to be a bit of a shambles as it seemed to be a restaurant / catering training establishment. The waitress, although very pleasant and cheerful, didn't really need to tell us she needed a drink and a cigarette break; that the gay chef (her words) was always on her back, etc. The meal was roughly what we'd ordered, with only a few mistakes, but I'll never understand how they managed to ruin a fairly simple rib eye steak.

New Orleans

This morning we headed out on a tour bus to see more of New Orleans than our immediate area. We saw some of the city parks, cemeteries and also spent some time in the areas still devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, some six years ago. Some of the houses were still abandoned and derelict and other plots were simple left empty. As few modern and interesting looking energy efficient houses had been built in some places, but the area still needed a lot of work.

In the afternoon I had a wander down Bourbon Street by myself and ended up enjoying a beer in the Musical Legends Park where Steamboat Willie jazz band were performing. Back at the hotel I did another lap or two of the Carousel Bar before we all headed out for an evening cruise on the Natchez riverboat.

There was quite a large queue for the river cruise on the Natchez, but once they started the boarding process it wasn't too long a wait. It would have been faster if there wasn't usual pose for a photo process before you boarded. We skipped that part as usual as we've never bought any of these tourist trap type photos. The meal was served in two sittings and as we'd chosen the first sitting we were tucking into our buffet meal before the Natchez had even cast off. After the meal was sat out on deck and listened to the on board jazz bank and enjoyed what view we had as it was quite dark by then.

New Orleans

It was our 30th wedding anniversary today - makes me feel really old.

Breakfast here wasn't a lot better than other places we'd stayed at. I had really had high hopes for southern style cooking but few meals had really stood out and most others had been disappointing. Catfish seemed to be a popular choice of fish but whereas I was expecting some succulent cut of fish most times is was just battered and deep fried and no different from any run of the mill fish and chip shop back home.

We headed out on one of the streetcars (we never found one called "Desire") and went to the National World War II Museum. I would have liked more time to spend looking around the various exhibitions but we'd booked a time slot to see their "4D" film experience which was really rather good and it was interesting to see the second world war it from the American point of view.

We rode various other streetcar lines to see the main thoroughfares of the city and had a walk around some areas but the heat and humidity were starting to get to us.

When we returned to our hotel the others wanted a rest so I headed downstairs to the hotel's famous Carousel Bar and had a few Blue Moon beers while the bar slowly revolved around the central serving area.

In the evening it really poured down and we didn't fancy having to go to far to eat. My wife was searching on the internet for somewhere nearby and surprising settled on a small diner nearby called Daisy Duke's. As I expected the waitresses were dressed in tight shorts and t-shirts but they weren't quite as good looking as the original. As usual the meal was absolutely huge and we had to leave a lot of it. My vegetarian wife ordered a Bloody Mary drink but it arrived with some unknown crustacean hanging off  the side of it, which totally put her off drinking it. I had  ago but it was too spicy for me so I went back to my beloved Blue Moon beers.         

I think we probably forgot it was our wedding anniversary and we'd probabky have made the effort to eat somewhere an bit more posh if we'd remembered.