Stone Mountain Our campground is in Stone Mountain Park, which is largely a tourist trap, but because it is the off-season things are relatively quiet. (I'd highly recommend this campground, beautiful sites and close to Atlanta.) We got a view of the carving of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the mountainside. I must admit I wasn’t impressed compared to Mt. Rushmore or Crazy Horse. We saw it briefly at night and then again in the morning.
Mary and the Coke Polar Bear
Our highlight of the day was the World of Coke – it gave quite a lot of the history, particularly about how it was a marketing miracle. They put the Coke logo on just about anything, since everyone needed a calendar that was the most common item. They also had several movies showing many of the famous Coke advertisements from around the world, including the famous ones with the little boy offering his coke to Mean Joe Greene, and the “I want the world to sing…”. Of course, they had a miniature bottle plant and then ended with a 4D movie trying to find the secret ingredient of coke (unique taste, universal availability, uniform quality, and you).
Then we spent a brief time at the Martin Luther King Historical site, near his birthplace. They did an excellent job of covering his life, largely through video clips and in his own words. Though I had remembered how he advocated non-violent protest, I hadn’t realized that he had actually studied Gandhi’s use of non-violent protest in India. He concluded that it was the best method to gain civil rights in the U.S.
That evening we visited with a college fraternity buddy, Bob Biagioni. We hadn’t seen each other since 1981 and since then he had moved to Germany, several places in the U.S., divorced, remarried, had a daughter, and retired. So we had a lot to catch up on.
