Christmas expedition

We are taking what has become our annual weekend trip to Atlanta later today.

Tea with Santa, the Atlanta Christmas parade, a puppet show, the Christmas lights at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, the Aquarium and some Christmas shopping if we can fit it in are all on the agenda.

We are also going to the holly, jolly Christmas Festival at Stone Mountain Park, year round better known for it’s 1,686ft high rock formation than snow angels and Santa Claus. The mountain also has the world’s largest exposed granite monolith, the Confederate Memorial Carving (photo), that took 57 years to complete.

Stone Mountain has had quite a history, and a very long one at that. Native Americans fought over it, then it was a granite quarry. The rock’s granite is used in the Panama Canal locks and Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel amongst other places. In the early part of last century Stone Mountain was a well known meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan and then ironically Martin Luther King Jnr mentioned the monument in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. The park has also been an plantation, an Olympic Games venue, a broadcast tower plus a scenic railway and today it’s a year-round theme park, complete this weekend with it’s very own snow-free Lapland!