Cycling Across America #23
Part 23 of the Cycle-Across-America series relayed day by day, exactly ten years after it happened. (Read from the start in Boston)
Ten years ago today I was having a first rest day since the rest days imposed on me by being knocked down in Virginia Beach:
Atlanta. Rang Kansas City and said I’d done my sums and I can make it there on schedule. I’m not convinced I can make it anywhere. It’s pretty tough.Another storm happens and I’m in trouble. A need to shelter means you lose mileage. But I’m more concerned about staying alive, and then about getting lodging. On the Weather Channel now there’s a 30% chance of storms tomorrow. But we’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.
My host took me on a tour of all the Olympic stuff, the Olympic Stadium, the Olympic Torch. The ParaOlympics are on at the moment. It was weird being right beside the torch, and thinking back to Muhammad Ali so recently.
The two stadiums side by side like the current Baseball one, which is going to get torn down because they can then alter the Olympic one and then that becomes the current one.The Dome, the big huge indoor one, which was used in the Olympics, half for Baseball and half for Gymnastics, and it holds eighty-odd thousand indoors. An amazing looking thing, outside.
And the Omni. The basketball is done in there. A crazy old thing, squared round thing.
Atlanta is very luscious. Very, very green. A lot of twisty turny roads like all of Georgia. It’s no different, but the city centre is not like the South, not like any other town I’ve come across in the South. Not remotely like Augusta, Madison, or any of the small historical places, or even the other ones, small and sleepy.
It was big skyscrapers and spaghetti junctions and some nice older buildings but they’re administrative buildings not like what I expected. But then I didn’t expect that of here because I knew it had suffered a lot in the “War Between the States”, as they call it down here.
And I remembered I’d wanted to see Martin Luther King. Even if he was dead. So we went to his memorial museum. An account of his life and things. That’s enough, and you read quite a few of his words. I was so pleased with that.
And then my host thought of the Cyclorama, supposedly the world’s largest picture –I’m not convinced. It’s a cylinder. You’re inside it.
The flat bit between you and the painting is called the Diorama, three dimensional stuff which feeds into the painting to give the whole thing a three-dimensional feel. And you’re on a revolving platform; some seats like cinema seats in the middle, which revolve all the way around.
It’s of the Civil War, the attack on Atlanta –the Atlanta Campaign. You see the Atlanta skyline as it then was, in the distance. It was painted in a year. It’s huge, the length of a football pitch, if you unroll it out and lie it down. And it’s forty-two feet high I think. It’s good fun.
We went to McDonalds for lunch –because he didn’t want any, but we were thirsty. And I tried an Arch Deluxe, to see what all the fuss was about. Nothing particularly special.
Heat Index, 86 degrees F. Temperature 82 F –that’s Atlanta airport.
After drinking a lot of Red Brick beer by the Atlanta Brewing Company, I finally forced myself to go to bed because I wanted to be up before six this morning to pack the bags to try and get back to where I’d finished up on Friday
Read the Next Entry in My Bicycle Trip Across America
Read from the beginning of the Cycle Across America
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