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.