Monday, September 17, 2007
World's Longest Escalator
We now return to our regularly scheduled Atlanta tourism station broadcast. I'm going to get a little post happy today and try to finish up on our Atlanta trip. Life just keeps happening, so I don't want to drag this on for too many days.
Let's turn our attention to CNN Center. On Saturday the 8th, Hubby and I had the afternoon to putter around. We had an awards banquet to attend that evening, so we couldn't do a touristy activity far away. We decided to take a tour of CNN, which is headquartered in the CNN Center in Atlanta, which was conveniently attached to our hotel. We could see part of it from a hallway on the sixth floor of the hotel. Here you see a shot of the escalator that is the beginning of the tour.
Before you enter CNN, you go through a security check, sort of like the one you go through at the airport. No one is allowed to take pictures. It's a good thing we couldn't - at least from the standpoint of the guy sleeping in the newsroom with his hands in his pants. (I'm not making this up.) It was a fine, fluff tour, with more traveling through hallways and down stairs than any hard-hitting information. The most impressive thing to us was discovering that the escalator we had traveled up - the very one you see pictured here - is the largest free-standing escalator in the world. It's five or six stories, by our estimation, and was originally built as part of a Sid & Marty Krofft theme park. (Sid & Marty Krofft of H.R. Pufnstuf, Sigmund & the Sea Monsters, and Land of the Lost fame.) That was the original purpose of the CNN Center - a theme park. It went bankrupt within five months. All that's left is the escalator, which we have had the privilege to ride.
While I'm sorry I can't give you an escalator ride, here is an online tour of CNN.
Labels: atlanta, cnn, escalator, husband, photo, sid and marty croft, tourism
Monday, September 10, 2007
The View from Room 636
Lucky you! I'm going to subject you to photos from our trip to Atlanta. We stayed at the Omni Hotel at CNN Center in Room 636. I'm going to see how Blogger sticks these photos in. They look a bit wonky while I'm in the screen to write this post.
The first photo is a shot of the back side of the Omni Hotel looking straight up. I love taking photos from this sharp angle. It makes the building loom. The second is a distance shot of the hotel and CNN Center taken from the Centennial Olympic Park (more about the park in a later post). The CNN Center and Omni Hotel are connected, which may not be readily apparent from the photos. The third shot is of the view out of our room, which was on the sixth floor of the hotel. Quite a bustling intersection down below. Very touristy area.
You're not going to see this in any of my pictures, but there were cops everywhere. Cops on motorcycles. Cops on bicycles. Cops in cars. Probably because there were so many tourists and this is CNN's headquarters.
Labels: atlanta, blogger, cnn, cops, hotel, olympic park, photos, tourists
