Biggs Cross Country 2017: Day 18 - Atlanta Georgia Aquarium

The Rotary Convention ends today with some boring business meetings and the final closing ceremony. OK, I feel guilty, but we skipped it and spent the day at the Georgia Aquarium. The convention was a very cool experience. We experienced four of the five days, trekking back and forth from our hotel to the Convention center. It was fun to see people from all over the world. My observations, which may be totally unfair based on a small sample, are: Africans are polite and gracious, Europeans are quiet; Brazilians are brash and loud; Indians are oblivious to your existence; Aussies, Brits, Irish, Kiwis are friendly with cool accents! The "Friendship House" was overwhelming! I'm not sure we ever saw all of it. The food options were quite good, but due to the huge number of us, it was hard to find a place to sit and for some required a long wait in lines. The biggest challenge was just dealing with 40,000 bodies! Rotary did a great job, there were no glitches that I noticed. And the convention staff was friendly and very helpful! The meeting hall had all those big screens and a great sound system. So we're glad we came but I'm not sure I need to do it again!

The Georgia Aquarium, opened in 2005, is the largest aquarium in the western hemisphere. We spent most of the day there, along with thousands of families with kids, school groups, and lots of hookey-playing Rotarians like us. They have two huge tanks. One features 4 huge whale sharks (although they were only juveniles!). Another has 4 Baluga Whales. But they also have penguins, otters, smaller fish tanks and great dolphin and sea lion shows. A bit after 4:00 we hiked the half mile back to the hotel in sweltering heat and humidity. Our day ended with a thunder storm with drenching rain! Glad we weren't back at the convention waiting for the bus!

We out'a here tomorrow. Heading for Ocala. But its been fun! We got a good taste of Atlanta. Nice place to visit but we wouldn't want to live here!