Day 4, back to Atlanta, heading to where the trip started… and to my final concert of this trip. The bus was still standing in front of a hotel, so that I could not stand doing a “Your Tour Bus – My Tour Bus” picture before I left the premises:

Al-Leluja

Hey, even the churches in Augusta love Weird Al… At least something. I also passed the Masters Grounds when I left the city, but as most of the time you either drive along a hedge or fences closed for looking through, I cannot offer you some pictures on that more than a shopping mall picture:

Starting in reasonable weather conditons, the trip to Atlanta has been mostly in terrible weather conditions like you see on that picture below.

It’s all about the five Olympic Rings

The first stop I did on the trip was at Conyers, some 20 miles East of Atlanta. The Georgia International Horse Park hosted the Olympics. It is massive. If you really need this size of facilities to drive Olympic Games, just for horse sports, it is easy to allow for the question if Olympic Games in general are sensible. But at least, it is still in use.

In Atlanta, I first drove to the sites of the former Olympic Stadium. I will do a separate post later on the Olympic heritage of the city, but here are some views of the area, including Turner Field (the follow-up of the Olympic Stadium and the former Olympic Baseball Grounds).

The home of Rhett Butler and the … Coke

Honestly, on this trip, I had a quite silly 1996 German Olympic song in my mind sung by a puppet called “Karlchen”. One of the lyrics about Atlanta states “The home of Rhett Butler and the Coke”. Unfortunatlely, it is so rare obviously that I could not even find the former video clip on youtube. But finally, here we go – World of Coca Cola, the Hall of Fame of the world famous drink. There is now a separate review on flyctory.com – but I can already say that you likely find better attractions in the city in my point of view.

Olympic Park… Closed

I was really sad when I saw that major parts of the Centennial Olympic Park have already been closed due to a music festival the week later. They do have some sort of “Hall of Fame” stones there – and I would have loved to walk around and honour some of my 1996 Olympic memories, majorly of course my all-time sports hero Leander Paes.

On one end of the park, there is also the Tabernacle, where Al played that night, right next to the Skyview ferris wheel.

The show at the Tabernacle

The Tabernacle, hosting up to 2,300 people, has been the biggest venue I visited on that tour – and the most beautiful one likely as well – they really did a nice transformation of a former Baptist church to a rock music venue there!

I did not have Meet & Greet tickets this time, but went to the pre-show, which has been a lot of fun, especially as I had to do the Vanna White job in this show (no pictures of that one 🙂 ). Again, the band showed a very different set list – for example, they did not start with “Fun Zone”, but were all five on stage at the very beginning. I loved to sing “The Night Santa went crazy” again, bt there have been a lot of other highlights as well – for example, Kimo playing the lapse steel guitar or Steve and Ruben playing the keyboards together. The tour is just absoltely amazing, each concert has been different, each one its own character. After three stages, it is really hard to get back home… Would love to travel on with you, guys!

The concert picture gallery can be found here: 2018-04-15, Tabernacle, Atlanta – I don’t do this too often, but I have to say: I love the pictures! On the pictures, you also see how perfect the PA worked on that show.

My Hotel: Home2 Suites by Hilton Atlanta Downtown

If there is a definition of “convenient location”, that’s what this place has been all about for me. From the hotel doors to the Tabernacle, it has been at most a four minute walk. The hotel concept is more aiming towards longer term stays. You have a small kitchen (they give you cooking plates on demand) and the daily housekeeping is limited if you stay longer. One top feature of the place has definitely been the roof-top, which can be used for barbecue… Or just to enjoy the stunning views over the city… Saves the money for the ferris wheel definitely!

Finishing this post with two night views of the Ferris wheel:

Here are links to the remaining posts of this trip reports :

• Trip Report Preview / Overview
• Day 1, 12th April 2018, Flight from Cologne to Atlanta, sleepover in Lawrenceville
• Day 2, 13th April 2018, Chattanooga, TN: concert and city sightseeing
• Day 3, 14th April 2018, Augusta, GA: concert and city sightseeing
• Day 4, 15th April 2018: Atlanta, GA: concert and city sightseeing
• Day 5/6, 16th/17th April 2018: Sightseeing in Atlanta, flight back to Cologne.