January Caffeine and Octane: Then and Now

Since this weekend's monthly meet was postponed due to freezing conditions around the Atlanta metro area, I figured we'd take a look back at some previous January meets. January is one of the toughest months for car shows. Why, on one of the coldest months of the year, would anyone want to get up at the crack of dawn, pile on layers, and walk around a parking lot freezing their toes off?

Well, since it's inception over a decade ago, Caffeine and Octane's consistently been an exception versus rule exercise. Yes, crowds are smaller in the earliest and coldest months of the year, but they're far from modest. I'll start by giving you some images from January 2013.

The mercury hung around 40F the entire morning, but there were several roadster drivers who toughed it out, bundling up and leaving their soft tops at home. That includes this guy in a Porsche Speedster replica.

Bundling up wasn't limited to the drivers of course. Spectators were just as ready for the temperatures, and I caught this couple both sporting Ferrari and Porsche attire from nearly head to toe.

Even the Rolls-Royce girls were out in full force. Wearing all black, they posed in front of a Rolls-Royce Ghost and a white Bentley Continental GT.

The chill was most apparent though when cars started to leave. After sitting for hours, the exhausts of supercars and muscle cars alike chugged out wispy white smoke against the overcast sky.

Of course, this was when Caffeine and Octane was still in its old location off Windward Parkway in Milton. The pictures I took in January 2013 didn't show it, but it was pretty apparent even then that the venue was reaching its capacity. Show cars had space, but spectator parking was hit or miss, with people parking at hotels across the street and even in the grassy undeveloped part of the business park where the show was held.

By 2016, the show had arrived at its current location. Perimeter Mall hosts the show in its massive outer parking lots, letting spectators and others hang out until about 11a.m. when the mall opens. By then, I'd armed myself with a new (to me) Canon 60D with a wide-angle lens, able to better capture the crowds that gathered even when Georgia was at its coldest.

Here, cars file in and out on the mall's ring road, a four-lane thoroughfare inside the parking lot. Many people just take laps, turning out onto the main road, going around the block, then turning back into the parking lot, since spectators line the entire route. Think of it like the Woodward Dream Cruise, but with fewer lanes and more Acuras.

An even better variety of cars showed up in 2016, with the show becoming more organized. Now it has its own website and PR team, and works closely with show car owners, television personalities, filmographers, and the local police department.

Built by Sunbeam in England and powered by a Ford V8, the Tiger is one of the lesser known 60's Anglo-American successes.

Mike Finnegan, writer for Hot Rod Magazine and host of the Youtube series Roadkill chats with Rutledge Wood, an Atlanta native and star of Top Gear on History.

The show now has a dedicated section to showcase the variety of cars that attend. This condensed piece of Caffeine and Octane can include rare vintage sports cars, six-figure supercars, and some grey market import oddities. Within the showcase, there are also several featured cars, given their own section in the middle of the show area.

But outside of the newly-designated area, it's the same Caffeine and Octane you remember from the earlier days, just on a much larger scale. Mopar guys hold down a couple rows, but aside from that the rest of the showfield is a mixed bag. Lowriders, Japanese cars of every shape and modification level, motorcyles, late-80s German sports cars, and even minivans are on display in the more outer reaches of the parking lot.

So the show has changed in a big way over the past three years, and now we're looking at an even bigger future for it, with the first Caffeine and Octane at the Beach event being held on Jekyll Island in March of this year. If the past is any indicator, this will be one you won't want to miss, and this January should be bigger than ever.

Avoiding Pandemonium on Atlanta's Pending Snow Day

Today's travel plans sounded a bit unorthodox. Two years after a small snowstorm halted the biggest city in the southeast, and I was going out to take in some downtown tourist attractions. Local news banged the same old drum, running what seems like stock footage from local grocery stores, lines full of yokels who think they'd need six gallons of milk and eight loaves of Sara Lee instead of, say, meals. I wanted no part in their folly.

But I still had my apprehensions about venturing into the city. It was already 2 in the afternoon, and traffic around my house didn't look promising. A Lexus RX330 made a u-turn directly in front of me in a 55 zone, a sure sign of bad weather is when the drivers give up. I soldiered on though, and picked up my friend in Kennesaw, a British girl I'd met at the hostel in Montreal. We wound our way towards Atlanta and got lost in conversation.

As it turns out, we're mostly the same around the world. Not to say there aren't vast cultural differences, things that cause strife and confusion and objectification. But the root of the human experience can be felt in the same sort of way, especially from one developed country to the next. Kayya and I spoke of jobs and college and the outlook of spending too much time and effort at both being meager at best. We're all just trying to figure it out as a generation, and there's both comfort and anxiety in that.

We hit some slow downs in the normal spots, I-75 south just before I-285, or as locals know it, the site of the new Braves stadium. Naturally, the conversation went to the topic of "death roads," and we swapped stories about roads in Guyana and Bolivia.

The two sites on our list were the CNN Center and the Westin's Sun Dial restaurant, seeing as we only had a couple hours to bum around before heading back to Kennesaw. As it turns out, CNN was shutting down early, so all of the restaurants and tours inside were closed. We snapped a few pictures of the inside and decided to make the short walk through Centennial Olympic Park to the Westin.

It was a cold and rainy walk, which reminded Kayya more of her native England than she liked. We talked about Waffle House, Chick Fil a, and southern food as we walked, soon coming to a giant revolving door that led into the lobby of the hotel.

I'd never been inside the Westin downtown, and the lobby reminded me of General Motor's Renaissance Center in Detroit. The lobby was all concrete and columns, with some patterned wood dividers adding a warmer and slightly more modern touch. Still, you could tell it was an older building reminiscent of one of the first modern booms in Atlanta history. It was the tallest hotel in the world when it opened in 1976, but was surpassed in 1977 by none other than the Renaissance Center itself.

A view of the Westin's lobby from a vintage post card. The water is gone now, but the Brutalist concrete remains.

The 72nd floor, though, hosts the building's real selling point: a 360-degree revolving restaurant that overlooks the entire city. The Sun Dial restaurant makes a full revolution every thirty minutes, and it's where we were headed.

Normally, the hotel charges you to go to the top, but the receptionist let us in for free on account of the weather. We rode the elevator, which runs along the outside of the building giving a full view of the ride up.

At the top, we walked around an indoor terrace above the restaurant. It had little pockets with touch screens and telescopes for zooming in on details of the city. Even though it was a rainy day, we could see all of downtown and towards the outer reaches of Atlanta. Almost directly below, the park we'd just walked through, then the CNN Center, Philips Arena, and the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium still under construction.

The CNN Center sits in the shadow of the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium in downtown Atlanta. When it opens this summer, it will be one of the largest retractable roof stadiums in the country.

Making our way around, we saw the Jackson Street Bridge, the Capitol Dome, and the Georgia Pacific Building, along with some of the original 19th-century high rises around Georgia State's campus. Up here, it felt like we were in a world class city, even though the decor showed its age a bit.

Which brings me back to a point we'd discussed earlier in the car: everywhere else is more interesting than the place you've grown up. I know this rings true for me, but at the same time I'm still capable of finding beauty and intriguing things in this city. Walking back from the Westin, I glanced at a scene unfolding in one of the many loading docks tucked into the sides of buildings throughout downtown. The light was simply not there, but a man loaded garbage cans in a hallway with a bright yellow wall in the background. When we went up the escalator, I grabbed a shot of Kayya's shoes against the yellow stripes on the steps.

So now I have a new intrigue for my city. To photograph more of those zany, ambitious structures downtown and to explore what's right in front of me. And as for that snowstorm? Well, it seems like anything that's going to happen is going on now, and it's a soft layer of slush. I'll see what the morning brings.

French Canada Road Trip: Day Five, Part Two (Montreal Botanical Gardens)

For Day Five, Part One: Old City Montreal, click here.

I'll start by saying that if you're not going to Montreal in late fall, you're definitely missing out. The entire region of eastern Canada, where most of the country's population lies, experiences peak fall color between mid-October and early November. I managed to catch Montreal at its peak time, and the colors blazed even on the greyer days I spent in Quebec.

Fiery leaves show no sign of fading in the grey morning outside the Montreal Botanical Garden.

Today started out looking like it would be just that: a grey, rainy day. I'd taken my car across town to visit the Montreal Botanical Gardens. This 190-acre park first opened in 1931, and is nestled in the ethnically-diverse borough of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie. Nowadays, the gardens face Montreal's aging Olympic Stadium, which can be seen from anywhere in the eastern half of the garden.

My self-guided tour started inside the main greenhouse, which is original to the property. The park charges a modest fee for admission, but residents can obtain a pass allowing for free access at any time. This makes sense, as the botanical gardens are nestled among two other large parks, and make for a relaxing departure from city life. Inside the greenhouse, plants from around the world are housed in separate rooms and allowed to sprawl freely. In several spots, I found myself ducking under vibrant purple ivy-lined limbs and zig-zagging through giant fern fronds.

Touring the greenhouse didn't take long, and when I got back outside, I was greeted by the clearest sky I'd seen since arriving in Canada. I followed a tree-lined path towards the rose garden and found myself stopping every few feet to snap pictures of the surreal display of oranges, reds, and yellows.

The rose garden was out of season, but a gardener still picked blades of grass and leaves from the plots. These acres of gardens are manicured by a large and largely unseen army of workers, and it shows. Never have I been somewhere that felt at once so vast and meticulously maintained.

I decided to walk over to the Chinese garden next. Dozens of lanterns marked the way to a garden lush with flowers and turquoise water. Built in 1990, the garden features two Chinese buildings, one of which was being refurbished, but the larger of the two was open, and had an artfully detailed ceiling with a magnificent lantern hanging in the center. Outside of the larger building, and surrounded by a wall resembling a Chinese dragon, was a fully-stocked bonsai display. Construction of the Chinese garden was led by 50 artisans from the Shanghai Institute of Landscape Design and Architecture, and took a year to complete.

Moving on, I decided the Japanese garden would be a logical next step. Plus it was only a short walk away. I moved on a winding path through the park as was intended by the designers. It's a place where you keep track of time not by a watch or cell phone, but by watching the shadows grow longer as the day goes on. Ken Nakajima, a landscape architect responsible for gardens in Russia, Australia, and Houston, Texas, designed the Japanese garden, which was built in 1988. Staples of this garden include the Japanese-style house, with a zen-inspired interior and central rock garden. There's also a koi pond behind the house, and a tea ceremony performed regularly during the summer.

Winding through the Japanese garden, I took a sharp corner onto a heavily-wooded pathway. This one led to the First Nations garden, which opened in 2001 as tribute to the indigenous cultures of Canada. It felt a lot like walking through the woods in north Georgia, as tall pines, maples, and birches create a dense forest in the middle of the park. Here there are totem poles and an exhibition area for performers and other volunteers who explain the many medicinal plants from the time period. The narrow path took sharp turns, and I was surprised by how accurately it replicated my fear of getting lost on some loosely-marked trails back home.

Thankfully the wooded path soon led uphill to the Alpine garden. This garden was one of my favorites, because it reminded me of my grandparent's mountain home in Bailey, Colorado. It recreates several familiar rocky outcrops with alpine plants native to certain high-elevation spots on earth.

By this point, it was well into the afternoon, and past time for lunch. I found the main path, flanked by mixed gardens and lined with tall, colorful trees. It led to the Restaurant Jardin Botanique, which served tasty soups and sandwiches while entertaining me with an eclectic soundtrack; .38 Special's "Caught up in you" played as I sipped coffee from a tiny mug and watched people sitting outside on the patio.

The garden is a great place to escape the buzz of downtown Montreal, and as I walked to the exit on the western end of the park, I pretended I was a Quebecois going for a walk through his magnificent city. 1600 miles away from home, I felt a distinct disconnect from the America I knew; from the election noise and cheap entertainment and work nonsense. Outside the gates, a group of four kids about middle-school age laughed as they sat in the grass, not worried about the uniforms they'd worn to school clean that morning. It must be nice to grow up here, I thought as I headed back to the hostel.

Next, I head to Downtown Montreal and Mount Royal Park. Check out Part Three here.