Boxing Day - Knoxville to Atlanta

Hi guys, Cleland/Buzz/Santa/Sick Boy/Joe/Nick/Hero here, doing my first blog after joining the boys in Nashville on the 23rd. My flight over wasn’t what you would wish for with international travel…. From Sydney to Taipei I sat next to a sick ten year old kid who had to use the sick bag 5 times in 10 hours. From Taipei to San Francisco I sat next to a Chinese man with absolutely no sense of personal space. Anyway…

We woke up on Boxing Day morning with the aim of getting on the road early to make our way south to Atlanta. This took a ridiculously long time because Dana decided that he wanted to go and look at a jacket that was on sale at an outdoor sports store and Carl was in the shower. Due to the unexpected late night playing poker on Christmas Day Wonders was elected designated driver. He had had the benefit of an extra three hours sleep because he had lost all of his money….three times.

The weather for the drive south was better than that to Nashville which meant the drive was not too bad. We stopped for lunch at Taco Bell where Dana educated us on the Mexican menu and Carl did push ups for saying MINE. The food was ok but it was a once only experience for me.

“Atlanta hosts 400 of the fortune 500 companies” That’s real talk!

We went straight into downtown Atlanta to have a look around and possibly have a look at the World of Coke before picking Monty up from the airport. At this point we got a call from Monty saying his flight had been cancelled and would be at least 4 hours late. We decided that we could go to the World of Coke which is pretty much a Coke museum. The tour was a mixture of company history, manufacturing information and ridiculous advertising presented in videos, 3D movies, speeches and displays. The tour of the facility ended with a taste testing of the Coca-Cola Company’s various products from around the world. At this point Marvin was thirsty and suggested that we should try every beverage that was on offer and it was decided that it would be rude not to. 48 different types of soft drink later we were all feeling sick and vindictive and punished Marvin by making him consume an entire glass of “Beverly”, an awful drink from Europe that literally tasted like arse.

From there we went to the hostel and booked in where we got another call from Monty telling us that his next flight had also been cancelled meaning that the earliest he would be in Atlanta would be 1am. Dana cooked us hamburgers and we drank beer while playing cards. We met this Zimbabwean bloke from London named Justin who had chased a girl to Atlanta to find out she had a boyfriend.

We met up with Justin at this Irish pub in Virginia Highlands and got ourselves a table. About an hour had passed and these two locals came over and sat down with us to say hello. One was a really friendly girl genuinely interested in what we had been up to but the other was quite the opposite. Jez had been at the bar and came back to the table and sat down and introduced himself…

Jez: Hi, how is it going?
Girl: I’m not going to have sex with you
Jez: OK…
Girl: You Australian men are like mosquitoes; you go from city to city sucking blood and spreading disease.
Jez: Riiight… I’ll see you later.

Monty called again and said that he wouldn’t be in ‘til the next day which was disappointing but we probably drank enough for all six of us. At some point we got separated and soon afterwards the pub shut down and everyone was kicked out. Not wanting to get a taxi, and thinking that home was not really that far away I decided to walk home. It was an interesting trip which got a little hairy when I was offered crack cocaine by a drug dealer on a random street corner. Needless to say I have learnt my lesson and will not be doing that again.

Over and out,

Nick