Virginia Tech
First on our Southern college tour was Blacksburg and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, better known as Virginia Tech. Because we arrived on a weekend, we weren't able to do an information session, but they had an online walking tour of the campus. So with mobile phones in hand, we walked around campus and visited as many of the building as we could.
On August 14, we had college tours planned at Duke and the University of North Carolina. We had driven down from Blacksburg the night before and ate breakfast in our hotel in Raleigh before driving over to Duke. After some circling around to find the visitor's parking lot, we took in the admissions session and campus tour. Thomas had pretty much decided against attending Duke by this time and the tour did little to dissuade him. After Duke, we had lunch at Noodles & Company in downtown Chapel Hill and then walked around UNC. Thomas was fairly confident of wanting to go into engineering, so UNC didn't hold much for him, so we skipped the admissions session and went back to the hotel for the night.
This is CNN Center
With no college tours planned for the day, we drove into Downtown Atlanta where we intended to tour CNN Center and the World of Coca-Cola.
Our first stop was CNN Center where Alex bought a Braves shirt honoring Chipper Jones' retirement. Jones was Alex's favorite Braves player, who started with the Braves the year Alex was born. We did the studio tour of CNN Center, where Rebecca was pulled up front to participate in a demo of how the 'green screen' worked to display graphics behind CNN presenters.
World of Coca-Cola
After CNN Center, we went to lunch at Ted's Montana Grill and then walked through Centennial Olympic Park to the World of Coca-Cola. We had visited the old museum near Underground Atlanta when we used to live in Atlanta, but hadn't been to the new location which opened after we moved away.
Georgia Tech
On August 20, Thomas' birthday, we packed up the car, said good-bye to Janie's dad and stepmother and the dogs and drove to our Alma Mater, Georgia Tech, for a campus tour. After finding a parking space near campus, we walked around the Student Center and old bookstore before going to an admissions session and a campus tour. We were both surprised at how much campus had changed in the 25 years since we had first set foot on campus. Following the tour, Thomas met with a representative from Air Force ROTC and then we went to the bookstore for a little shopping. Upon leaving Tech we stopped by Houston's for a few platters of chicken fingers and got on the road towards Nashville, where we would be spending the night before finishing our drive home.
