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Published: March 22nd 2016
The best newsreading team in the world !
Kerry doing the headlines whilst I am waiting to do the sports report.Alarms were set for 7am as we had to get to our first booked tour. We have a cooked breakfast buffet at the Best Western Plus which was pretty reasonable selection and everything was pretty fresh. I had Scrambled Eggs on toast with a sausage shaped like beef patty, blueberry yoghurt, muffin, and a pancake with maple syrup that I made myself in this fancy machine in 1 minute. All you do is put down a plate and press start and here it comes. Not real tasty and then Kerry said the next person’s was twice the size as mine (I guess I just warmed the machine up for them !). Kerry had more sense and had some healthier options. Next we headed off to the CNN Centre via Centennial Park which was built for the 1996 Olympics and you might recall they had a bomb go off in this park at the beginning of the games. We had booked the VIP tour and it started at 9.30am. Wow the CNN Centre is an amazing wrap a round building with a void in the middle. They occupy about 10 floors all around the outside where they prepare and manage all CNN
Weather Man in Training !
Where do I send my resume ? broadcast content 24/7 (some studios are in other locations). Because we had the VIP tour there was only 5 in our group (or party of 5 as the yanks say). Really heavy security here even more than an airport. We got to into the newsroom area where they create stories and produce them, we got to do a mock photo session at the news anchor desk, and went into the control room where the Director has a massive wall of screens where he/she chooses what we are seeing. The best bit though was actually going inside the live broadcast area where someone called Robin Meade was broadcasting the morning show across USA on the sister HLN channel. Amazing to see how it is all done. They showed us how they do the teleprompting, the green screen for weather and things like that. They have a regular tour that does not give the access to these areas and we did not have to pay much extra for VIP tour. After about an hour or so we finished at the gift shop like most places, and yes we got sucked in to buy some mementos. I tried on one of the Weather
Olympic Games
Cauldron & Rings from 1996 Channel jackets the guys where when they are broadcasting in the middle of a hurricane (I can hear them now saying yeah it’s blowing hard here now !), They are so thick you wouldn’t even feel the cold wind and at only $59- great value but not something I really need for windy days on the golf course in Tweed Heads. On the ground floor they have a massive food court so we had our first Starbucks coffee and Subway for lunch. Soon this place was overflowing with people as heaps of schoolchildren started coming in. We could tell some of the general CNN tours had at least 30 in each group. Next we headed back across Centennial Park to our Atlanta Trolley Tour we booked today. It went for about 1.5 hours and showed us some great sights of Atlanta such as Downtown high-rises, Philips Arena aka NBA Basketball Stadium home of the Atlanta Hawks, Georgia Dome (NFL home of Atlanta Falcons) which is being replaced by a new NFL stadium that is costing $1.4 billion and the owner of the team is putting in $1 billion of his own money towards ! We also saw the Olympic Rings
and Cauldron from the 1996 Olympic Games, and went past the house where Martin Luther King Jr was born and preached. They showed us all the buildings in the city that make up Georgia State University and then we went to midtown where we saw Fox Theatre, and the house where Margaret Mitchell penned Gone With The Wind. Finally we drove through Georgia Tech University and saw some of their massive sports facilities (College Football holds 50,000, Basketball holds 15,000). Weather forecast was for afternoon showers but it was fine all day and still warm around 26 degrees. Dropped off right next to or next tour booked which was World of Coca Cola VIP tour. We got here a bit early so went to gift shop first and bought a couple of things (let’s hope I won’t need to use the stress ball until I get home and back to work !). Coca Cola was invented here in Atlanta and this is where the World Headquarters are located. The tour showed us a lot about the history and we saw the vault where the secret recipe is stored. They had a tasting area where you could sample over 500 different
coke brand flavours (e.g. Fanta, Sprite etc.) For dinner we went to Hard Rock Café, and initially told the wait was 45 minutes just like last night. But they at least had a bar we could wait at so I told Kerry I would see a few bar stools empty at the far end so we snuck down there and sat down. Boy was this place loud and going off! We ordered a couple of drinks and the bartender said it was OK to eat at the bar so he gave us menus and wow was this food awesome. We had a mixed combo with hickory BBQ sauce Mexican spring rolls, bbq chicken baby drumsticks, chicken strips, margarita pizza strips, onion rings. I had a Bud Light whilst Kerry had a Berry flavored Pina Colada. Noisy place but great atmosphere. Lots of memorabilia on how like a pair of shoes Madonna wore on stage Tomorrow we pick up hire car and start the road trip.
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