PreBaby GetAway 2011! Part 2

            As our most loyal readers (meaning those who can dedicate 8 minutes a month to skim over our pitifully scarce output) no doubt remember from the first thrilling installment in this two part saga, the chilling intermission came at the point where Mag and I had stopped a child from being sold into slavery, safely piloted a plane to the ground after the pilot and co-pilot tripped over one another and hit their heads, foiled a ring of international jewel thieves mid-heist, and just barely escaped to the mirage-like safety of the world's largest piece of granite: Stone Mountain (located, cleverly enough, in Stone Mountain, Georgia).

            Stone Mountain was formed back in the days when Earth was a roller rink and the continents were bumper cars, randomly floating around and bouncing off of one another willy nilly (this is science, folks). When Africa gave America a particularly unexpected whiplash inducing bump it set off a chain of events. The pressure created the Appalachian Mountains and forced some sort of molten minerals out from beneath the surface of the Earth. Not all the substances escaped, however, and this one in particular formed a giant bubble underground and eventually hardened. Over the course of a million billion trillion gazillion years all the land slowly compressed and eroded, eventually revealing the large hunk of granite (again cleverly titled as Stone Mountain granite). Then, in the early 20th century Georgia carved the world's second largest carving on the face of Stone Mountain. A carving of the President...of the defeated and disbanded Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis. Generals R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were also a part of the carving. And thus, Africa's entire goal when it originally hit America was finally fulfilled. That's called playing the long game, boys and girls.

          My, "soannoying" alarm rudely jerked me from my reverie in the early pre-dawn hours and I used every ounce of will and power to drag myself from the soft confines of our hotel bed and slither into the bathroom (where I had conveniently set out everything I'd need for my adventure the night before). Moments later I was stumbling across the 40 degree (Fahrenheit, not angle) parking lot and climbing into the car. Stone Mountain has a 1.3 miles hiking trail that goes up the side of the mountain and leads to the top of the dome. It's steep at times, but not all that difficult, and it's pretty cool. The park doesn't open until 10 a.m. but, my line of thinking went, since I was staying inside of the park I could find my way up the mountain beneath the crescent moon and watch the sun rise from on top of the mountain. Stone Mountain recently underwent a lot of renovations, attempting to turn it into some sort of family get away that takes it's cues from Six Flags. It built a little village with different activities and rustically carved signs saying, "Candy Shoppe" and a speaker system that continuously plays horrible, horrible, god-awful, mind-numbing children's music (side note: Why can't children just listen to regular music? Is the sound of it too complex for their brains to handle?). I suppose when revamping the park they spent a bit too much on faux log cabins and funnel cake emporiums and ran out of funds for some of the smaller things. You know, like signs.

           I drove around this park in circles in the dark (lyrics from an Iron Maiden song, I'm sure) looking in vain for the trail head parking lot. The only signs I could find (and trust me, I stopped and made sure to read every sign) said, "Park Exit" which wasn't very helpful, except telling me where not to go. The other signs said, "Parking" and there were about a thousand of these signs, which were each equally unhelpful. The park was surprisingly busy for 6:45 on a Sunday morning, with a lot of joggers running about like disturbed ants. I pulled into a parking lot, finally, and pulled up Google Maps on my phone. I looked around on the map trying to figure out which road the trail head would logically be located on, and then tried driving to it. Every way I tried to go was blocked by a barricade or lead to another parking lot or a dead end. Finally I got to watch the sunrise, while I drove in frustration back to the hotel. I walked in to find Mag lying in bed with the doors to our 4th floor balcony open, watching the sun rise above the lake and filter through the trees into our room. "How was your hike?" she asked. "It wasn't." I replied. So much for adventures.

           After getting ready and packing things up we went to eat a delicious breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Mag got us some overnight package at the resort that included breakfast, a night's stay, access to all the wonderful little resort commodities like hot tubs and outdoor heated pools and the sports bar and the spa (you actually had to pay for the massages, of course) and tickets to all the attractions at the new Stone Mountain Wonderland. The restaurant is run by exclusively foreign people. These are the type of people I like to refer to as, "Cruise Ship Foreigners." They aren't the type of foreigners you normally run into - people from Germany or England or Mexico or the Caribbean or India or the Middle East. They're all from places that we never really think about, like the Ukraine or French Guiana or something like that. They all have unplaceable accents and complexions that defy categorization. There was one guy with an impossible to understand accent who was manning the omelet station where he omelet of the day was, "Grilled Buffalo Chicken and Bleu Cheese." I was going to get him to make me one but I filled up on grits and eggs and sausage and bacon and hash browns and orange juice and coffee and all those other sorts of breakfast foods that you eat so much of that you immediately want to go back to bed.

The sculpture from the most awkward angle I could find. In the 70s
Spiro Agnew and others had a banquet on the horse's butt. 

            Go back to bed we refused, however, as we had many things to accomplish before the Falcons played at 4:15 p.m. Now that it was daylight and we were armed with not one, but two, maps of the park, we headed back out in search of the trail head where Mag would drop me off and let me run at incredible cheetah like speeds (with gazelle like grace) up the side of the mountain. However, even with both maps and both noggins a'thinkin' and four eyes a'searchin', we still couldn't find the place and nearly exited the park before I pulled the emergency brake and executed a brilliant three-point turn and headed back into the maze to do more searching. Long story short, there was some weird charity bike ride going on that weekend
called (and I'm not making this up), "24Booty." In honor of that classy and ingenious title, Stone Mountain had decided to close off and barricade the road leading to the trail head and greatly inconvenience all of the, you know, normal people who were going to Stone Mountain to do what people normally do there, which is experience the mountain of stone, not ride bikes on a road. Defeated, we turned and tucked our tails between our legs and went to execute Plan B: Operation Ride the Sky Car to the Top of the Mountain (we aren't smart enough to come up with catchy names like, "24Booty").

             The sky car was created for for people who find themselves unable or unwilling to walk to the top of the mountain. People such as fat people, old people, small children, disabled people, people in a hurry, but definitely not pregnant women. At least, that's what all the warning signs told us as soon as we got in line. Now, I know different people react to rules in different ways, but, every since I was a little child I immediately begin to think of ways to circumvent them. I'm one of those spirit of the law people, not letter of the law people. I understand why stop signs and red lights exist, but I run a red light and a stop sign every single morning on the way to work. Why? Because it's dark, I can see a long distance in every direction, and I know no cars are anywhere near me. I was once pulled over by a police officer for running a stop sign and when he asked me why I did it I told him, "Because I can see all five lanes of the road for a mile in either direction and you were the only car in sight and you were headed in the opposite direction from me. There didn't seem to be a reason to come to a complete stop." He gave me a written warning. Anyway, I knew that there was no way the sky car was actually dangerous for pregnant women - the rule exists just to protect Stone Mountain from lawsuits. Mag and I shared mischievous glances and then she zipped her jacket over her belly and slung her purse across it. When we boarded I walked between her and the ticket taker and just like that we were career felons.

This really looks like it should be flying
down like a person on a zip line.

            The sky car is pretty neat, it takes you to the top of the mountain passing to the side of the carving so you can see just how huge (and deep) it is. Once on top of the mountain we ran around for about 40 minutes, taking pictures and pointing at the Atlanta sky line and saying things like, "There's that spinning restaurant we ate at! There's the king and queen office buildings! There's mountains way off in the distance!" We walked around to a side of the dome I'd never been to before (and it doesn't look like anyone else has either in the past 20 years) and found our hotel down below across the lake. It's one really big rock, this Stone Mountain. It's really quite amazing when you're standing on top of it and feeling like you're on the surface of the moon which recently crash landed into our planet. Really though, if you aren't hiking there's only so much looking at rock you can do, and so we sneaked back aboard the sky car and rapidly descended back to the earthy loam of ground level. On the way down we were standing next to the door and I told Mag, "Imagine if these doors came open half way down. What would happen then?" Some old man who was clinging to a pole for dear life told me, "Don't say things like that!" and admitted he was afraid of heights. I thought that was cute. There was still one more thing I wanted to do in order to fully review the Stone Mountain Experience. (For those keeping track at home, so far I'd gotten up early and driven in circles, returned with Mag to drive in circles, waited in line to sneak on to the sky car, ridden up and then back down again). That thing was the astonishing ropes course (called something more like, "The Cloud Walkway" or, "Hangin' Around" or, "Tree Climbing Without the Fun Part (Danger)").

All the instructors got stuck because they were afraid so
this is when I was going to save them all and carry
them back down over my shoulders.

            This rope course is like three or four levels high, reaching heights of...I don't know about 40 feet, and is a series of walkways that are strung between poles. Some of the walk ways are just 2x4s, some are ropes, some are wooden lily pads, some are wooden bridges with no rails, some are rope bridges with a rope hand rail, etc. There are only so many different ways to string ropes between poles so you necessarily repeat some of the same obstacles along the way, but at different heights. It was fun and not scary at all, which was kind of weird. I used to work at a ropes course at a summer camp that was only about 15 feet high and for some reason that shorter one seemed much scarier to me. Perhaps it was because it was between trees, not girders, or perhaps it was because I knew it was being run by inattentive teenagers (as I was one myself) and that when I said, "Okay I'm ready to jump off now" the guy belaying me would let me fall until I was 5 feet above ground and then hold the rope taut, jerking the harness deep into my crotch and then everyone would run and try to swing from my legs as I tried to kick them away. Stone Mountain has come up with this really genius system where they put the end of your safety rope (the rope that catches you if you fall off of one of the obstacles) in a trench/runner sort of thing on the girders that run above your head. The only way to get it back out is at the very beginning/end of the course so you never need a guide to do anything to your equipment the entire time. You just move your guide rope along the series of runners, switching from one obstacle to another, sliding yours down a small dead end so someone else can pass with theirs, etc. I love this sort of thing, because it reminds me of a puzzle or a maze or something. I know I'm doing an awful job of describing it but I really found it rather clever.

         While on the course some evil red headed 9 year old girl in a pink track suit (why do red heads always wear pink? It seriously clashes ladies, just letting you know) who was next to me dared to tell me I was breaking the rules and I couldn't do what I was doing. Ignoring the fact that she was, of course, wrong, can you BELIEVE some little kid would tell me what to do? When I was nine years old I never would have told some manly hunk of self-possessed know-it-all that he was breaking the rules. Hell, I'm 27 and I wouldn't even have told that 9 year old that she was breaking the rules. Why do I care what she does? I of course paid her no heed and continued to do what I was doing, attempting to teach her the important lesson about life - no one really cares what you think. After finishing the course (while Mag walked around beneath me and took approximately 87 pictures) we looked around to see what else there was to do. They had all those super awesome events that are created to take up space in brochures but cost no money to host (such as, "Story Telling" and, "Pumpkin Parade" and, my favorite event, "Shopping") but nothing for two young spry (severely pregnant) adventurers. Deciding that the time had come to suddenly morph into old fogies, we bought a giant warm funnel cake and climbed aboard the train to take a ride around the mountain.

Mag looking at the far off city of Atlanta.

           Train rides are super boring, as everyone knows, and are a lot like riding in a car except louder and slower and more predictable. A widely known truth, however, is that anything can be fun if you really want it to be. This was proven in the cloying and sappy movie, Life is Beautiful which made even the holocaust funny (or the lesser known lost Jerry Lewis film, The Day the Clown Cried in which Jerry Lewis plays a clown that dances children into ovens in concentration camps). Mag and I told one another jokes and played pranks on one another and took pictures of her belly holding a fork and eating funnel cake and screamed and waved at people who were walking on the parallel trail (and moving about as fast as we were). There were two interesting things on the train ride (I'm telling you to save you the trip). One, the train went through an old town that consisted of about five buildings (a jail, school house, city hall, etc) that are now used as storage but were at one point the important buildings of an actual small town built right against Stone Mountain. Two, the tracks pass the side of the mountain that has deep quarries cut out of it as, in the most American of ways, business people found the world's largest piece of rare granite and immediately began harvesting it to make money. It's the same thing folks did when the found the Redwood forest - say, "Look at these amazing trees, there is nothing else like them in the world! Think of all the lumber they'll make!" and immediately started cutting them down. Thank goodness for national parks.

              After the train ride we headed back home, stopping by Babies R Us to buy our son a high chair since he was such a good sport over the course of the weekend. It was the fourth Sunday of the NFL season and the fourth Sunday I'd spent away from home. I was gone this past Sunday as well so with any luck I'll be able to spend all 16 Sundays busy and away and never getting to sit in front of the television all day watching football and seeing the same horrible beer commercials repeated over and over again. Stone Mountain is less than 2 hours from our house, and our entire mini-vacation lasted less than 24 hours, but we had a marvelous time and returned home equal parts exhausted and refreshed. Logically speaking, it's all a waste of money. We can sleep in our own beds, and watch football on our own TVs, and climb our own trees, and eat our own food, and get bossed around by strangers for no added expense. Psychologically speaking, however, the benefits of escaping the daily grind for a night or two can never be over estimated. Do it.