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We were both up before sunrise on Sunday. Worried about getting out with the Atlanta Marathon going on. You could see thousands of runners out our window. From the
Publix Atlanta Marathon website, it looked like we were going to be landlocked! Clay was up and showered first and he went out to see about bringing back breakfast and if he could ask someone about driving out of the parking garage and away. I showered and made coffee and worked on packing up. Clay came back in a bit of a panic and said we need to leave now. So, after the race had started but before dawn we left the Hilton Garden Inn. I had called in for express checkout and left a voice mail message. The instructions for express checkout were to leave keycards in your room or in a basket at the front desk on your way out. But, I thought we had to have a keycard to exit the garage. Clay thought that all keycards should be left behind and a garage attendant could let us out. I kept my keycard and a good thing because there were no employees working in the garage that we could find, nor any signage indicating how to exit. I drove past a cone going the wrong way and drove a half block to a police woman working a gap in the barricades. She pointed us out to the left and off we went. We zigzagged our way around downtown with u-turns, etc. trying to find a spot ahead of the runners to get out of the race route. After about 15 minutes and the sun rising, we finally got ahead of the pack and got out. We turned back in the direction of the zoo, now needing to kill a couple of hours and started looking for a place to park it and eat some breakfast. We found an open
Krispy Kreme with Hot Doughnuts Now in neon, and while that would have been fun and interesting to compare to ours at home because it looked identical, we didn't think we could spend much time there and really didn't feel like doughnuts. A bit further on we found an open
IHOP and pulled in. Clay ordered the Senior 2x2x2 and lamented the absence of hash browns, though he wouldn't take any of mine and I had way too many. I saw Eggs Benedict on the menu and that just sounded perfect to me even though I always get pancakes at IHOP. I liked IHOP's Eggs Benedict and thought they did a pretty good job on them and in the end I had some of Clay's pancakes. We almost forgot to take a photo of our food!
We killed as much time as possible at IHOP and then we set off early towards the zoo thinking to stop in at
Oakland Cemetery to kill some more time. We could have spent much more time in Oakland! It was a beautiful cemetery, a few years older than our
Oakwood Cemetery, smaller but lots more money in theirs than ours.
We set off again for the zoo trying to approach from a different direction to get to the parking lots we saw right in front of the entrance. We found it easily enough and got a parking spot on the front row! We got in line behind about 7 other people with advance tickets or zoo memberships and stood waiting for 9:30am opening. We still wound up entering behind people who started out behind us in line and without tickets, so go figure.
Zoo Atlanta handed out nice maps with the day's schedule of events listed on the back. Oddly enough,
Po on 1 hour display was not listed, but they just started that on 3/11 so maybe they have had a chance to print new maps up. We also did not find any Po merchandise which sorely disappointed me! I guess Po is just too new yet! Anyway, we made our way straight back to the panda exhibit to look for Po. That is all we did look for Po. He was buried under his mom's bamboo and sound asleep. She was an eating machine on that big pile of bamboo and slowly uncovered him, but he stayed asleep. Oh well, we saw
Po! (Click the link at the left to see our video of Po and Mom. Back arrow should return you here to the blog when done viewing. Sorry we did not get a good still photo of Po.) I am looking at the PandaCam now over a week later and Po is out and active and in the same public viewing room where he was only out an hour every morning when we saw him. It is afternoon now! I guess the other reason Zoo Atlanta has printed up public viewing info on Po is that it is still constantly changing. Oh well.
The weather on Sunday was very different from Friday and Saturday. It was cooler and overcast, but no rain. So, it was still nice. Zoo Atlanta is pretty small and compact, so we took the rest of the morning and wandered it all before heading out of town between 11 and noon. We watched some orangutans playing tag, along with some monkeys and apes. But, here is video of
Orangutan Tag (click the link!).
Man, the signage for the interstate was crazy! We saw one to I-85/I-75 pulling out of the parking lot and followed it and the others all over downtown Atlanta, but they would never give a sign to actually turn on an entrance ramp so we kept missing it! Finally, I saw a street saw that was something like I-85 Entrance Ramp Road or something and I pulled a quick turn on it and onto a highway while we looked for additional signs to tell us where we were. It turned out OK and we were on our way.
Clay started surfing the Internet on his phone after we were well into SC. He finally picked a place outside Charlotte, NC called
Bubba's. Now for those of you who know NC barbeque, you know that there is a pretty firm geographical divide between
Eastern Style and Western or Lexington Style Q. Well, weirdly enough here in the heart of Lexington barbeque land, Bubba's specializes in Eastern Style Q. So, that is the exit we started looking for and found around 3pm. I had a chicken white meat quarter with slaw and baked beans. Clay had the Q combo plate with slaw and potato salad. The hush puppies had onions in them! Yuck! We skipped dessert. Clay had to ask for another to go box. We added it to the little cooler sack I had improvised in the trunk with a ziplock bag of ice and a frozen bottle of water. One other fun thing here was the photos around the dining room of people with or in Bubba Shirt T-shirts around the world. After seeing those Clay had to get a T-shirt with its very visible giant font. He also bought a giant apron! Also, last meal and we completely forgot to get a photo of the food!
We had one more stop for oil for the car once we figured out that was the light that kept going on and off on the dash. We were home by 5pm. End of Atlanta road trip!
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