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.

There's one more day left in 2016. "We've got to remember to take the joy sign down," said my mother, a couple of days ago. She was talking about one of her Christmas decorations, the words "J-O-Y" spelled out in lighted red letters, hanging in our foyer window. As if it's only appropriate to sanction off joy to this time of year. Of course, that's not what she meant, but I'm certain that if you've been anywhere near the social media vortex lately, you've seen the headlines.

"2016 is the worst yet," "2016, just die already," "I'm done with you and your cruel games." The titles read like a cringeworthy middle school breakup note posted on Facebook. Each one fuels the fire more. Memes get created, crappy Buzzfeed caption videos get shared by multiple people. Dark forces get lambasted. ("why did you take Carrie away from us?")

Truly, if we look back on it, it was a bad year for a lot of people. Here in the United States, you could barely tune out the white noise surrounding the presidential election, which seemed to drag on for years rather than months, and is still dragging on. The list of celebrities lost has been long and varied, from Prince to Muhammad Ali and his close friend, photographer Howard Bingham. We could reminisce on these things, and it seems like that's what we've chosen to do.

Around me, friends have felt the struggle in their personal lives as well. My friends from college, now in the 22 to 25 year range, had the same problems I did finding work. It probably didn't help that most of us went for liberal arts degrees, but honestly it seems as though everyone who's young right now is struggling. For about 11 months of this year, I was deathly unhappy in a job I took because I felt it was the right thing to do, and because I looked past what my internal rhythm was telling me.

But, saying all of this, I wouldn't write the year off as all bad. I've seen this sort of thing happen before, after all.

I can start by saying that I was an avid Tumblr user throughout college. The site was a great time-filler, the kind of thing I could hop on and spend mindless hours scrolling through. To me, it felt more personalized than Facebook, because I could express through I was largely through visual materials. Fine art architectural photography, vintage Italian cars, old photographs from the National Geographic archives, and captioned screencaps from America's Next Top Model all resonated somehow. And people would open up on their own, for better or worse.

But the point lies in the statement here. "(insert year) is the worst ever" was a post I saw dozens of time on Tumblr. For 2013, 2014, 2015, until I stopped using the site regularly. It reminded me of when I would wallow in failed relationships blaming myself, even though I knew deep down that the other person had way more problems than I did. Of course it's the worst, because I can scrape up about 20 examples of bad things that've happened, ignoring the fact that bad things happen on a daily, hourly, minute-to-minute basis. It's just human nature.

So rather than continue to harp on how terrible 2016 has been, I'd encourage the masses to think instead about some of their own personal triumphs. Certainly it's been a tough year, but think of what you've learned, seen, accomplished. It's almost impossible not to have grown through these experiences. Those intense emotions we've all felt are good, they remind us that we're alive and that no matter what's going on or what we're going through, that it's possible to come back. At the very least, we have to retain that hope and approach each day, not just the year, better than we did the last.