Atlanta & more

Going to keep this one short because we’ve done so much over the past two days it would take forever to go into detail and I couldn’t do it justice anyway.

Yesterday in Chattanooga we spent the day on Lookout Mountain, the most southerly of the Appalachian Mountains it is absolutely beautiful and features a selection of attractions as well as a lovely community and some unbelievable houses. Featured in the selection of photos yesterday are pictures from the caves and underground waterfall of Ruby Falls, the incline railway (which is the world’s steepest passenger railway at 72.5 degrees), a national historic park with amazing scenic lookouts and Rock City: a beautiful trail through gardens, caves, caverns, waterfalls and more. The whole area is stunning and is a highly recommended place to visit and would make a lovely place to live, one day...

We had some awesome news before we got to Atlanta...the hotel we were due to stay at had been closed down and we were due for an upgrade to a Hilton Garden Inn, in the centre of downtown Atlanta. We are spending our last night there now and it is lovely, perfect location next to all attractions and perhaps the nicest stay we have had yet, we’ve just got back from a moonlight swim in the roof top pool and Jacuzzi.

Atlanta itself is a really nice city, it has a larger skyline then I expected but all the skyscrapers are very different from one another and there’s a lot of interesting architecture and large parks leftover from the 1996 Olympics, which makes the whole of downtown a really nice place to wander around. Hopefully London will benefit in the same way after 2012.

Today we did the three main attractions in downtown...CNN Behind the Scenes Tour (a 50 minute tour through CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta), the World of Coca Cola and the Aquarium (which is the world’s largest). All of them were a lot of fun; you get to see the news being filmed live at CNN, sample over 90 drinks from around the world at the Coca Cola World and see the world’s largest fish, the Wale Shark, at the aquarium. Check out the photos and look for an update again in the next few days as we finish our lateral haul across the country and make it to the West coast and Charleston.