I guess it's about time.

We have been back from vacation for two weeks now, and I guess it's finally time that I come to terms with it. I don't want to though. I'm longing for the warm days on the beach, eating seafood on the water in Southport, and endless days of dreaming what life will be like when we (someday) move over to that side of the country. We're quickly sliding back to school though, and before we know it our days will be filled with the monotony of work, school, and homework. Throw in grad school applications and it sounds like a winning semester to me! We are more than thrilled to be about done with school. In 16.5 weeks we will be officially done with our bachelor's degrees and done with Utah State. Praise all that is holy!

This semester is actually going to be pretty easy for me. I am doing an internship this semester at the high school Brandon went to, and that requires 20 hours a week. I will be in the counseling office! Besides that and working 25 hours a week, I have one class for 2.5 hours once a week, and another class that is all online, but only requires me to attend "artsy" events such as plays, concerts, the ballet, etc., and write an essay on each event. So this semester is going to be pretty easy for me. Brandon is taking five classes, but one of them doesn't start until October. The first 8 weeks of the semester will be pretty kind to him, and then the class that starts later is taught by the professor he is working for and has taken a class from before, and shouldn't be too challenging. We are just ready to be done!

Alright onto the trip. I will try and keep this concise, because I know my posts can get a little wordy (for example, see the two paragraphs above).

Flight to Atlanta:
Our flight departed at 3:05, and we got to Atlanta at about 8:00 their time. We had no layovers, and our flight ended up arriving early, so that was nice! And we just took carry-ons, so we didn't even have to wait for our luggage! We picked up our rental car, a cute little Chevy Spark that is similar in size to a golf cart. It was perfect though! Quite roomy for the two of us, and plenty of room for our luggage.

The hotel we stayed at in Georgia was actually about thirty minutes north of Atlanta in a town called Alpharetta. We drove from the airport, past Atlanta, towards Alpharetta without stopping in the city. I think Brandon and I decided not to tell anyone this, but I am going to tell you anyways. We did not even think about the fact that toll roads exist. Not even once. So there we are, driving along the freeway, and we reach a toll booth. And guess what? We didn't have any change. I think I had like two pennies. The nice lady said she would have paid for us, but she didn't have any change either. Not sure why they don't just catch up with the times and take cards, but whatever. They said they were going to send a bill for $25, but we have yet to receive that bill, and mostly I just think it's funny that they charge so much for not having two quarters.

Anyway, we got to hotel and checked in, and it was super nice. I am still very proud of myself for finding a nice hotel at a good price. Then we left the hotel and went to find some dinner. We ate at a place called Burger-Fi and it was delicious! We actually ate a ton of good food on our trip, but this was a great start.

Day 1 in Atlanta:
We made it a point to sleep in at least some mornings on our trip, and Atlanta was the place we slept in the most. We finally left the hotel at like 10:30 or 11:00, and first things first, went to a bank and got some change for the toll roads. Then we made our way downtown, found a parking garage near all the things we wanted to do, and guess what, they didn't take cards either, and the only cash we had on us was the $5 in quarters we got for the toll roads. The nice man let us in still, and told us just to come back with some cash at some point in the day. We decided that, since we had a lot of time in Atlanta, we would just walk to the nearest Wells Fargo and pull out cash for parking and such. The nearest Wells was about half a mile away, which isn't a terrible distance, but the GPS put us through some sketchy backroad to get there. When we left the bank though, we realized that there was a not-so-sketchy main road right in front of the bank. So we took that road back to the parking garage, and were so close to getting there when we witnessed a minor car accident. The driver of the car that got hit got out of her car so fast and started throwing swear words at the old lady that hit her, and I was scared. Old ladies aren't scary, but they are scary in Atlanta when they are swearing and the hooligans from the sketchy road you walked down previously come out to see what is going on. Luckily, everyone that was there (with the exception of the crazy swearing lady) was really kind and made sure everyone was okay. Brandon was the first person to call 911 so we waited around to make sure they didn't need us for anything.

After all the fiascoes that morning, we finally got to Coke World, our first real destination. We bought a CityPass for Atlanta, which cost about $80 a person, but got us into Coke World, the Aquarium, the Zoo, the CNN Studios, and a few museums. Coke World was neat! We got to learn the history of Coca Cola, see the bottling process, and try different sodas from all over the world. FYI: all the other sodas are gross. After Coke World we got some lunch then went next door to the aquarium. It was Saturday afternoon, and it was so dang busy. Our CityPasses came with a free ticket to the dolphin show, but by the time we got there all the tickets were sold out, so we couldn't redeem ours. The aquarium took about 3 hours to go through, and it was cool too, but there were so many people that it was almost hard to enjoy ourselves. We then walked through Centennial Olympic Park, which was big, but not as cool as I was hoping.

When we got back to our parking garage, a guy in a nice truck three spots down from us had had his truck broken into. Someone broke the window and stole something out of his car. Needless to say, this on top of all the other things so far in Atlanta had put kind of a bad taste in our mouths, so we decided to get out of downtown and go to a park. We found a really nice park about 15 minutes away with some botanical gardens and a lake, so we hung out there for about an hour, then decided we were hungry. We didn't want to drive back into downtown Atlanta for dinner, so we started to make our way back towards Alpharetta when Brandon realized that he didn't pack any swim trunks. So while we were hunting for a place to eat, we also stopped at every Ross, Marshall's, and T.J. Maxx's we could find. We didn't find any that night, but we did find a delicious Mexican restaurant with live (good) music!

Day 2 in Atlanta:
We both woke up feeling a little unsure about Atlanta because of our experience the day before. Because of this, we decided to take our time getting to our destinations. We stopped at a few places to look for trunks for Brandon, and finally found some at Target. Then we went to the zoo! The zoo was just a normal zoo, but it was still fun! It was in historic downtown Atlanta, so it was neat to see all the old houses and such. After the zoo we headed back downtown to take a tour of the CNN studios. The CNN building is huge. Our tour didn't start for a while after we got there, so we had fun just walking on the ground floor and going into the touristy shops. The tour was pretty cool. We took the world's largest free standing escalator up into a huge globe where our tour began. We go to see the different studios they broadcast from, and also the newsrooms where they piece the stories together.

After our tour we walked around the outside of the CNN building, and just behind the building is the Georgia Dome where the NFL Falcons play! Adrian loves the Falcons, so it was fun for me to have a little part of him there with us. There was a drumline competition going on inside, but it was a little pricey, so we just spent a few hours walking around outside, and also seeing the outside of the basketball arena where the Hawks (I think) play.

We had tickets for a Braves baseball game that night, but still had a few hours until the game started. Brandon wanted to go eat at a place called The Varsity, which is apparently super popular, but I was surprised at just how popular it was. We showed up, and I'm pretty sure every other person that was going to the Braves game that night was there too. We waited in line for 45 minutes, and they had probably about 20 registers open, I'm not even kidding. The food was good, but by the time we actually got our food, we had to hurry to make it to the game, so we basically just inhaled it. The roads to the game were busy, but luckily we had prepaid for parking, and had a perfect spot. We only paid $12 dollars a piece for our tickets, and were pretty sure that our seats weren't going to be very good, but they were perfect for the price! And no one even sat on either side of us. It was so much fun! We have grown to love baseball lately, and it was way fun to get to watch a professional team. We stayed up through the seventh inning, then decided to leave so we wouldn't have to deal with traffic getting out of there.

I'm about off work, so I will blog about the next few days tomorrow. You can look at all our pictures here even if you do not have Facebook!