Atlanta 2010

Atlanta, Georgia. Papi’s hometown. A big southern city with the world’s busiest airport. We got back a week ago from a great family trip to Atlanta.

Every time we travel we are reminded of just how much our bambinos love to travel. K & O have been travel-lovers from the start. And now their sister is catching on too. These three love every single aspect of it. The airport (even when the flight departure time is 6:30 a.m.)~~

The flight~~

The cab rides~~

Every single bit of it is revered and enjoyed. Would they have been travelers entirely on their own? Or have they caught the travel bug from us? (the age old question: nature? or nurture?) We might be fascinated by these questions, but at the end of the day, the bambinos don’t know, and they don’t care. All they know is that they LOVE (love love) to TRAVEL.

And sometimes, when I look back on the photos from a trip, one stands out for some reason or another. It isn’t always the best photo (it usually isn’t), and it doesn’t necessarily have any sentimentality attached to it (often it doesn’t), but it just folds itself into my memory as a little token from the adventure. This one, for whatever reason, is a new favorite of mine:

We stayed in a big center city hotel. Despite all the hotels we’ve stayed in as a family over the years, K & O had never stayed in one quite like this. The lobby, alone, was an adventure. With big glass elevators overlooking a huge atrium, just riding the elevators (a hundred times a day — or as often as we’d let them get away with) made it worth the trip.

The hotel also had a roof-top swimming pool (a first for the bambinos: swimming in a roof-top pool)~

And the room service was pretty terrific too (Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse was the hotel’s room service! we had never eaten at a Ruth’s Chris, so we were in for a treat! and now we’ll never be the same again because K & O discovered Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse cheesecake and their lives were from that moment onward forever changed)~~

But, honestly, to us, even our good old standby, Subway sandwiches, taste a whole lot better when eaten in a hotel suite (watching Curious George on the travel-DVD-player to boot!)… so, who really knows?~

Our Atlanta trip coincided with Braydon’s 39th birthday. We were happy to be able to have lunch with Grandpa Robert that day. K & O could not have been happier with the birthday lunch at Hard Rock Cafe. They were pleased as punch when they succeeded at getting our server to wrangle the whole restaurant into screaming “Happy Birthday” to Papi.

Our Atlanta trip also coincided with a work conference for Mama. Some good work got done. And some good fun got done there too… Braydon brought the bambinos to the conference one late afternoon so that we could all meet up with old friends for drinks.

K & O got to re-connect with, and M got to meet for the first time, our dear dear friend from Boston/Grad School, Patricia (sadly, Meera screwed up that photo shoot by refusing to take part in it), and my two star graduate students of all time — Maggie and Xochitl — both of whom babysat for K & O at different phases of their baby-/toddler-hood, and both of whom have gone on in Sociology (and make me so very proud of them)!

Major highlights of the trip included:

• A day trip to Grandpa Robert and Carol’s house. We rented a car to make the hour+ drive out to Gainesville and their beautiful home on Lake Lanier. We had so much fun and the bambinos were spoiled like they’ve never been spoiled before! In addition to a day of golf-cart and pontoon-boat riding, Lake Lanier swimming, and the swimming pool, there was a new doll for Meera (a doll who was quickly named “Gainesville”), the boys’ first water guns (!), more pool toys than K-O-M knew what to do with (!!!), and a day-long spread of a huge assortment of many of the bambinos’ favorite foods. While there we got to spend time with Sabrina and Katie and Charlie too. It was really, truly a good good day. A major memory maker with Grandpa Robert and Carol was lots of time spent jumping off the pontoon boat into VERY WARM (warmest lake we ever have swam in!) Lake Lanier… especially spectacular was watching Meera jump off the boat, climb up the boat ladder, and jump off the boat again over and over and over and over. It was awesome to see her — at age 2 — doing this!–and keeping right up with her brothers!
  
• Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park was right next to our hotel, and we spent quite a bit of time there during our stay.
• A day at the Georgia Aquarium, which really has to be the best aquarium ever. Thank you Grandpa Robert for this treat-of-a-day! And thank you Carol and Sabrina for joining and making it so fun.
• Perhaps the highest high of a highlight of our trip–   a very, very special morning for our family spent at The King Center. Really, this deserves a whole post unto itself, and hopefully we’ll find the time to devote a post to trying to articulate all that it was for us, but in the meantime I can sum it up with one word: profound. We had seriously considered whether or not to go, thinking it might be gauged too old for K & O (and obviously it is way over Meera’s head). But we decided that we would go for it, and we were so glad we did. It was a truly marvelous experience for all five of us. A precious time to store in our family treasure box and rely on as a foundation for lots of conversations in years to come. K & O were reverent, interested, and into it (and Meera was her typical up-for-anything self). Kyle, especially, was incredibly moved by the experience. And all of us were able to expand upon already established conversations, and begin new ones, related to subjects that are– and will forever be– near and dear to our family: discrimination, racism, tolerance, non-violence, social change, justice… just to name a few. To be there, and to come fully to face with the reality that before MLK, and the many other great ones united with him, our family would, literally, not have been able to exist… it was just completely so real that it felt surreal in the most powerful way. It was really something. Something we are still reflecting upon, and something that will not soon be forgotten. And something that is at the heart of many of the conversations that we’ve had daily in the days that have followed. Our presence there together as a unit of five was truly special, and our experience of that place was a trip to remember.

Photos of some of the highlights in separate posts below here, here, here, and here. Atlanta 2010. Another great trip for the J-Ms.