Atherton Family Notes

We’re about halfway through our spring break, and this is our last night in Atlanta.  It’s been surprisingly cold and rainy here this week, until today at least.  The weather cleared up this afternoon and it was gorgeous outside.

We’ve hit most of the big name attractions here in Atlanta.  We went to the “World of Coca-Cola” museum on Sunday, as well as the CNN center.  Monday, we hit the Georgia Aquarium and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.  We briefly stopped by the Margaret Mitchell house (since the girls watched “Gone With The Wind” on the way down) as well, but we didn’t go in.  Today we went to the Zoo and the Natural History Museum.

We’ve gotten some good pictures (at least indoors) so hopefully we can make some scrapbook pages.  Carissa seems to be interested in doing her own scrapbook, but I think she’s going to go the non-digital route.  She wants to do all of the cutting and pasting that goes along with the traditional methods.  I’ll get her out of that mode soon enough.

Tomorrow, we are off to Macon to see the Cherry Blossom festival there.  We’re hoping to get a few good spring pictures of the girls since the weather was so cold on Easter in Indianapolis.

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…when it shows up in a scrapbook page, but I thought I’d post it now anyway.  We took this picture in Macon, Georgia, at the annual Cherry Blossom festival.  You gotta love the painted toenails.

We did see a lot of beautiful cherry trees in bloom in Macon, but unfortunately, we didn’t get any pictures of the girls with the trees.

We got back from our vacation on Saturday, after finishing the week in Savannah and Hilton Head.  We also passed through Asheville, North Carolina on the way home, but decided not to visit the Biltmore since it was raining… and because it was going to cost *cough* $100 for us to get in.  That’s even considering that the girls were going to get in for free!  If I’m going to pay that much to see a rich guy’s stuff, I’m going to do it when it’s sunny. 

When I found out how much the admission was, I felt the same cognitive dissonance that I felt when I paid to see the Queen of England’s jewels at the Tower of London:  “This woman is already unbelievably rich…Why am I paying her to see her fabulously valuable stuff?”

Anyway, I’ve started going through the pictures and started putting together some layouts that I hope I’ll start posting soon.  Carissa has started her scrapbook as well, and we might try to get some of those pages on here.

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One of the most interesting places we went while in Atlanta was the World of Coca-Cola Museum.  It’s basically a 3 hour marketing presentation disguised as a feel good experience that you pay $12 to get into.  You really have to admire the Coca-Cola Corporation for putting this together.  I don’t mean to sound jaded about the experience.  I’m just impressed that they got us to pay them to advertise to us. 

When you enter the museum, they give you a short presentation about the company and some of its more famous advertising campaigns.  This is followed by a short “documentary” about what happens when you put your money into a Coke machine.  Oddly enough, it involves a lot more singing and dancing than I expected…  I put a still shot from the movie on the scrapbook page.

Afterwards, you go into the main museum, where you see exhibits about the history of the company, historic and worldwide promotional material, and then a short tour of a working bottling factory.  The second floor contains several pop art exhibits and one of those 3d movie theaters with moving seats.

At the end, they have a series of fountains that allow you to try lots of the different flavors the company sells around the world.  Here are the drinks that were available at one of the fountains:

The “Bibo Candy Pinenut” drink from South Africa was the overall favorite of our family.  It tastes like really sweet pineapple juice.  There was also an aperitif style drink from Italy called “Beverly” that was universally our least favorite.

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Near the end of our spring break vacation, we booked a last minute hotel room on Hilton Head Island, which is about a 40-minute drive from Savannah.  I had recently been to Savannah for a couple of hours during a recent business trip, long enough to know that it was worth going back to walk around and see the sights.

It wasn’t a very nice day.  It was cloudy, and it drizzled a fair portion of the day but it was still beautiful.  Spring had definitely arrived.

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I’ve been trying to get more exercise recently.  During the winter I rode a stationary bike, but beginning in March, I switched over to walking outdoors.  Being the gadget crazy guy that I am, I decided to try to motivate myself with the Nike+ running system.  This is a little device that you put into your shoes and I connects to a receiver on you iPod Nano.  It’s not cheap, though:  The shoes plus the device cost about $100 dollars, in addition the the Nano, which we already had anyway.

It is possible to save some money by not buying the Nike+ shoes, which I did at first.  I got a small bonus from work recently, though, and decided to use a little of the money to go all out.  

When I walk, the system counts calories and distance and then I can upload the data to the web so that I can see how well I’m doing.  I’ve currently given myself a challenge to burn 10,000 calories in 4 weeks.  I’m about halfway through the 4 weeks, and I’m a little ahead of where I need to make the goal.

Notice that I said “walk”, though.  I’m not a runner, and I may never be.  My knees are already unhappy with me when I walk 4 miles a day, so I may just have to put up with my 17-minute-mile pace.   I bought Nike+ for Sandi for her birthday and she uses it to run because she just wants to get the distance over with.  Me, I listen to podcasts of radio shows to stay entertained or walk with my mom.

So far, Nike+ is keeping me pretty motivated.  As of tonight, I’ve reached the first milestone: 100 miles.  So far, 164,000 people have made it that far.  The next milestone is at 500 miles, which only 20,000 people have gotten to so far.  The highest level currently available is 5000 miles… there are 14 people who have run that distance.  I wonder how far I’ll get.

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Carissa’s reaction to the earthquake this morning was pretty funny.

Sandi and I both woke up out of a dead sleep and were just starting to panic when the wave subsided.

The girls hardly stirred though.  Carissa said she was aware of something weird happening, but she wasn’t quite awake.  She told us that she thought CeCe (who sleeps in the bunk beneath Carissa) had gotten out of bed and was playing with a boulder.  Dropping it on the ground, I guess.  Carissa then said she thought someone turned on the washer and dryer.   Then she went back to sleep without any further question of why her sister might be doing something so strange so early in the morning.

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We had planned to go to the Georgia coast and stay in or near Savannah during the last few days of our vacation.  Since we were winging the actual accomodations for this part of the trip, we stopped at a Krystal burger in Macon (for the Wi-fi connection, not the food) to see if we could find a cheap hotel online.  We lucked into a deal at a resort on Hilton Head Island.  The resort is on the beach, and less than an hour from Savannah so we couldn’t pass it up.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t all that great during our stay.  It was very windy when we got there, and the temperature dropped 10 degrees between the western side of the island and the beach.  The kids got to swim in the heated pool, though and it warmed up nicely the morning we left so we got to have a nice walk on the beach.

We didn’t take many pictures on Hilton Head, but Sandi did get a few good portraits of the girls, which I worked into this layout.

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