Time Travel

When I finally dragged myself out of bed yesterday, I realized that I have only been home from Georgia for a week and was startled by that. At the beginning of the week, it was looming so large in my mind: "Georgia. I was in Georgia. It was great. Who can I tell about Georgia?" And now it seems so long ago and everything has fallen back into the routine of before.

So you now get to be my audience while I reminisce on the highlights of my trip to Atlanta. But I promise I won't bust out the slides :)

The people you meet:
I managed to spend the first couple of days with co-workers who were very good at picking up people to hang out with. On night 1, the lovely Sarah of South Dakota joined my co-worker and I for dinner. This was the same excursion on which my inner 5-year old got really excited about sky bridges and I laid out mental bread crumbs to be able to find my way across the sky bridge, through the neighboring hotel, and to the food court beyond. (Sky bridge to escalators where you have to look up because it's such an awesome view to the "Session Evaluation" kiosk to the next sky bridge. And on the way out, find the DQ and go in reverse.) The next night we picked up Rebecca of Utah, just down the road and at a sister institution. And I even braved it enough to bring along Kelly, from Chicago, during lunch one day. I enjoyed this accumulation of acquaintances and realized it's pretty easy to befriend fellow archivists.
I also ran into old colleagues, including my dear and wonderful other half of "Melise" which was a delight. It was kind of cathartic to see some of these people and especially helpful to see my current situation through their eyes, without any of the baggage.

Technically, this is not a slide, so I didn't lie. This is the view going up the escalators in my bread crumb trail. Turns out, scenes from Catching Fire and Mockingjay were filmed here. 

The Hotel:
During the whole trip, there was this fight to get out of the Hotel bubble. We were in a spot in Atlanta that had half a dozen hotels all right next to each other and several of these were linked with sky bridges so conceivably, you could spend the whole week there and feel like you never left the building. There were times when this drove me crazy, which makes me think I will not do well in a post-apocalyptic world that requires remaining indoors or underground.
My room was on the 18th floor, which was fine, but the elevator service was rough going. I did manage at least once to go all the way from the 18th floor to the lobby without stopping for anyone else. Once or twice I only had to do one or two stops, but when the conference was in full swing, well, it was no picnic. Imagine 200 people all getting done with their sessions at the same time and all going to their rooms on 27 different floors. And there are no stairs (except emergency stairs), so you don't have the option to get off a floor or two before yours. You just have to stop at every floor. And, of course, the people getting off first were at the back of the elevator. The one cool thing was they had a couple of elevators that went down the outside of the building. These were my favorites, although getting one was a bit of a gamble--it was like an amusement park ride (only not as fast).

For some odd reason, the elevators had mirrors on the ceiling. 

Site Seeing:
Of course there was a lot of site-seeing to be done. I found myself wandering out alone quite a bit, which may seem odd, but due to the pre-conference workshop I took, my schedule was just a bit out of sync with everyone else's. It worked out okay, though, because going alone gave me some photo-ops I wouldn't have had with the crowd. Among the sites visited were the Georgia Aquarium (we missed the Olympic swim team by 3 days), Centennial Park, the State Capitol, the Martin Luther King Historic Park, the Coke museum, and the Center for Civil and Human Rights. I also attended a Braves game.
I can't say that I'm a huge enthusiast when it comes to state capitol buildings, but this one did have some really good displays in it. Other than that, it's probably your typical state capitol. Dome, fancy staircases, portraits of politicians. While looking at the exhibits, there were 2 different stories that I was familiar with because of my podcast listening, which was awesome--first, that I remembered the podcasts, and second, that all my podcast listening paid off. (Of course, I think it pays off even if it doesn't get mentioned in exhibits in state capitols, but you know what I mean).
As for the other tourist sties, I'll go into them next time. Be excited. Be very excited. At the very least, it beats news about the presidential campaign.