A peach of a weekend

The temperatures weren’t much different in the peach-tree state to those we left behind in Bermuda but we had a lot of festive fun in Atlanta and as always crammed a lot into our long weekend.

Saturday morning we had front row seats for the Christmas Parade downtown (photo). I’m normally from the school of ‘once you’ve seen one parade you’ve seen them all’ but this was particularly good and for two hours various giant inflatables, dancing dogs, dancing humans, school bands and dressed up horses held our 2-year old’s steely glaze and smiling face.

Also in town Saturday was the SEC college (American) football final between LSU and the University of Georgia and bizarrely I got a tweet from a Charlton fan who was in Atlanta for the game, which ended in a very one-sided affair. Thousands of LSU fans had piled into town for the occasion and one family I talked to in Starbucks had driven 9.5 hours, which I suspect was quite common.

On Sunday we took the drive to Stone Mountain Village, a place steeped in Confederacy history. The granite mountain is over 1,600 feet high and is famous for it’s huge shallow engraving depicting three famous figures of the Confederate States of America: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis each riding their favourite horses.

The carving is said to be the world’s biggest, roughly 3 acres in size, and took 60 years to complete. Martin Luther King also mentioned the monument in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington DC, when he said “let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.”

Stone Mountain is a year round resort and most people know it for the laser show, but at Christmas part of the base area is turned into a festive village complete with Mr & Mrs Claus, snow angels, toy soldiers, pantomimes, music, theatre, a parade, thousands of twinkly lights, and as much old toot you can shake your wallet at. Again however it sparked our daughter’s curiosity into life and was well worth the drive.

Then finally on Monday, interspersed between shopping, which included a replacment iPad 2 due to a cracked screen plus lots of strong coffee, little ‘un met both Santa (who is actually quite scary close up) and the much more affable Prescilla the Pink Pig, an Atlanta Christmas star since 1953. Both meet and greets cost us a fair penny in staged photographs, but what are you to do?

I like Atlanta, it’s southern hospitality and sense of modernistic. The traffic is a pain in the rear mind, although there is a rather decent train service between downtown areas, but most people seem to chose to live out in the large expanse of suburbs, where in some places you can pick up a decent sized house for a song.

Back in Bermuda then, work will be a little intense as will the Christmas parties, but it won’t be long before we are back on a plane and heading home for Christmas.