For the 4th of July we went to Atlanta and stopped at Biltmore Estate on the way, which is the largest privately owned home in the US.
It has a lot of gardens.
The dining room.
There was a huge outdoor terrace.
And a four-story chandelier.
The house also has it's own bowling alley...
...and swimming pool.
There is a winery on the property, too, which had tastings.
In Atlanta we went to the Sun Dial restaurant, which rotates. At the bottom-right of the picture you can see Olympic Park.
Another direction with some neat buildings.
We bought CityPasses, which get you in to multiple tourist attractions at a discount. The first one we went to was CNN studios.
There were signs everywhere warning workers to not turn off breakers or cut anything if they weren't sure exactly what it did. I'm sure they'd love to have the entire network taken off-air because somebody pulled the wrong plug.
Here's the actual studio. The anchor desk is at the top. They purposely show all the people working in the background during the broadcast.
The World of Coca-Cola was next. The only room anyone really cared about was the tasting room, which has 60 types of Coke products from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Then we went to the Georgia Aquarium. The CityPass was especially nice here because the line was much shorter with it.
Some jellyfish in different colors of light.
A room with a wall and ceiling open to an aquarium.
A ray swimming along the ceiling.
This was a huge aquarium with tons of fish and even a whale shark.
A beluga whale.
Penguins.
This area had a touch pool with rays and sharks.
We went to Hooters for lunch. This family of three were all gigantic. They ordered like 50 wings, 20 clams, fries, salads, and more. We decided that you should have to do five pushups and situps for every wing you eat.
Monica didn't want to be in the picture with the waitresses as much as Rob and I did for some reason, so she took the picture.
I think if the women have to wear outfits like that, the guys should, too.
I liked that they had newspapers above the urinals to keep you entertained.
We went to the Atlanta History Museum after that. It was close to closing, but we got into the last tour of day. This deer kind of freaked me out; they had it posed so it was staring right at you when you came around the corner.
The Swan House was a neat old home.
I liked the story behind the mirror in the dining room. The architect had symmetry everywhere, and the home owner bought a frame for the mirror that wasn't symmetric just to mess with him.
Downtown had only giant skyscrapers except for this little house all by itself.
Our last attraction was the Botanical Garden. We had been walking around all day long in the heat and humidity, trying to see as many things as we could, so we were all pretty tired by the time we got here.
Finally we went to Olympic Park to watch the fireworks. There were tons of people sitting on the grass.
They had a few really neat ones, like these rainbow fireworks on the side and some that spun around.