I spent some time this morning hoofing it around downtown Atlanta with my friend Daphne. We tried to follow this Street Art trail, which was a lot of fun. We were on the MARTA train trying to figure out the most efficient way to get to the starting point and another passenger advised us that the neighborhood for a further station wasn't great and that we should get off earlier (which was fine; it was what the MARTA trip planner recommended anyway). The funny (?) things were that by walking to the starting point of the trail, we ended up walking by that station anyway (and there were no problems whatsoever late Sunday morning), and also that there was a lot of doubling back, because we ended up getting to see the public art on the side of the MARTA station that we started from. Fun time though — we got to walk most of the way around the Mercedes-Benz Stadium (football), which is very interestingly shaped and also massive.

During the walk, we went by a restaurant (Old Lady Gang: A Southern Eatery) in both directions, and we noticed a few people in line both times! It turned out that the restaurant was good enough for them to wait up to 30 minutes or so before it even opened (and by the size of the line of folks arriving after opening, they must have been onto something). We also noticed a block on a street that was basically shut down: they were working on a set for a movie being filmed, DMZ, and got to appreciate the detail of some of the props and set pieces that had been (presumably) artistically aged.

It got pretty hot for late brunch and a bridge being out led to a longer route to the restaurant that we tried to go to... when we put our names on the list, it was within 90 minutes of the restaurant's close, and that was their estimate for us being seated! We decided to try to walk to find a place that we could hang out in with air conditioning and were rejected by the Coca Cola Museum Store (some kind of story about needing to go through security first?), so we found another place close to Centennial Park and canceled the reservation. At that point, probably 20 minutes after registering, their app said that were still #122 on the list!

I took a scenic route to Franklin. I went through the town of Helen, GA, which was super cute. It is very German themed, kind of like Frankenmuth, ❌I, but with more connection to the river (they had activities like rafting) and no obvious/prominent chicken restaurants. I went through Helen a couple years back (and got some cool postcards for my postmark project), but that was on a Monday afternoon during the school year. It felt like a completely different town when it was buzzing with people.

Afterward, I rounded a corner in the hills and, far off, I saw a beautiful scene with clouds billowing at the peaks of mountains off beyond the trees.

I stopped for dinner and heard some really interesting stories from folks. Another patron told me that he has colon cancer and that he has not shared the bad news with his (adult) children yet. I learned that the cook, who was new to professional cooking, had only been on the job for five or six months, and only had about a month of training before being put on the heat. I was pleased with my meal, so I was complimentary. I also learned that at the end of the waitress's shift, she had to cash out and return 15% of her table order total to the restaurant. I'm not sure how all that works out; I can see that they'd need to collect some for taxes, but if servers expect to get $2.x per hour plus tips (and if 20% is standard, paying 15% back doesn't leave much). On a good note, at least she didn't have to pay the credit card fees for tips left on cards (some Rochester places are passing this cost on to their service staff, which I find deplorable). I'm not sure whether the explanation of the money return was well explained, if she was just frustrated by it regardless, or if it's just straight-up wage theft, which is pretty rampant in the restaurant industry (and tipping has its own sets of problems anyway). Either way, interesting math and fascinating to hear.

Finally, when I was checking in, I noticed that the clerk had a somewhat British-sounding accent, so I probed and found that she was South African, and trilingual (also spoke Afrikaans and Zulu). She has kids living on four continents, including one in town (which is what brought her and her husband).