Mother's Day Weekend in Atlanta

Our weekend trip to Atlanta was three-fold.

First, my father wanted to knock off another Major League Baseball stadium off his list - one of his major personal goals in life.

During my first year of life (2012), he took me to my first baseball game in Miami's Marlin Park. Then last year (2013), he took my mother to Colorado's Coors Field, home of the Rockies. So on this trip, he went to see a Braves game at Turner Field - but without me and without my mother!

This time, he decided to take his friend John Mark instead of us. Our friend John Mark and my father went to the Braves-Cubs game on Friday night along with John Mark's sister Jenn who lived nearby.

Despite having a first place team, Atlanta fans weren't that into their hometown Braves, so tickets were somewhat easy to come by and at reasonable prices. For $45/ticket, my father and his friends sat Terrace Infield Section 205 in Row 12. As you can see from the photo here, they were pretty great seats. The same seats at Yankee Stadium in NYC would run at least $100+ each.

The game was pretty great (or so I heard) with the Cubs rallying in the 9th inning against the Brave's All-Star closer, Craig Kimbrel, to tie up the game and send it into extra innings. Then in the bottom of the 10th inning, the Braves' Freddy Freeman singled home the winning run from second to earn a walk off victory! So now, after Atlanta, my father has now been to 28 of the 30 major league stadiums. The only remaining ones being Minnesota and Kansas City, though since Turner Field will be replaced with a new stadium in a few years, we'll probably have to come back to Atlanta in 2017.

The second major reason we went down there was to experience Red Neck culture. For those of you who don't know what a Red Neck is, check out this Urban Dictionary definition.

So we could have driven around looking for wanna-be Honey Boo Boo families in the local trailer parks, but figured they wouldn't appreciate us driving up and taking photos of their double-wides. So instead we decided to go to Stone Mountain, so that we could get to see some Georgia sights as well as scope out the locals.

Stone Mountain Park is a park out in Dekalb County. Stone Mountain is the site of a famous giant carving commemorating the military leaders of the Confederacy (Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis). In case you can't appreciate the scale of the carving, it's 90' x190' in size (roughly the size of 2.5 football fields), making it the largest bas relief sculpture in the world.

In addition to looking at the relief from the ground, you can also take a trip to the top of the rock and get a 1,686 foot perspective over greater Atlanta. It costs around $10/person each way for the 2 minute ride, but it was pretty cool to see everything from the top.

  

Then during each evening at 9:30PM back on the ground, they have a laser light show set to Americana music using the Confederate Leader sculpture as the background. Unfortunately, that night it was pouring rain, so my father took me back to the car while our friends and my mother stayed out with umbrellas to watch the show. No that's dedication (if not a recipe for pneumonia)!

The next day, we were off to see the third reason we came down to Atlanta...