Tuesday, February 27th
Back on track with the food tour! Yesterday I hit another local favorite: The Flying Biscuit. Went with several kids from the cast for a very late breakfast (it was a day off, after all). The Flying Biscuit serves breakfast all day along with sandwiches and more substantial home-made entrees. Their namesake biscuits were tall, fluffy and delicious. (I didn’t realize that biscuits, much like barbecue, are a Southern obsession. At the bookstore we visited after breakfast there was an entire cookbook devoted to “biscuit dives” and their various recipes.) I had the “Southern Scramble”: 3 eggs, cheese, turkey bacon, onions and collard greens. DELICOUS! It came with a biscuit, cranberry apple butter, cheese grits and home-made chicken sausage. (Why not all grits are cheese grits, I’ll never know.) I practically rolled out of the restaurant. Everybody was equally happy with their meal – Piper’s French toast with raspberry sauce being another favorite.
Thank heaven that the Flying Biscuit was a little walk from the hotel; we all needed a little exercise. On the way home, I stopped off and toured the “Margaret Mitchell House”. In addition to preserving the house in which Ms. Mitchell and her husband had the basement apartment, they have a collection of Gone With the Wind memorabilia. The tour of the house is sort of anti-climatic. The whole first floor is mostly empty save for some photos on the wall depicting her family (she’s related to Doc Holliday of Wild West fame) and the various stages of the house and the neighborhood. Then, you go downstairs to the apartment. It’s a tiny apartment furnished with period (only two pieces belong to Ms. Mitchell) furniture. In the corner of the front room, they’ve recreated the desk where she wrote Gone With the Wind. The tour moves on to a room with some of her correspondence (interesting) and then into a gallery space with photos of Martin Luther King. Then, your tour guide gives you a tour of the gift shop. I wish I were kidding. I've posted some photos below in an effort to save you $13.
The exterior of the house.
The front room of Ms. Mitchell's apartment. Her desk is in the upper-right hand corner.
Today, much of the Spamily went to the Georgia Aquarium. It was amazing. The first gallery that we visited featured an enormous tank with 60,000 fish inside. The stars of that first gallery, however, were the 3 whale sharks. These giant fish are 20 feet long but eat tiny shrimp and plankton. Swimming alongside them were grouper bigger than a person, several kinds of sharks and all manner of smaller fish. The final room in the gallery had a wall of acrylic that was 23’ tall and 60 feet wide. I could have sat in there and watched the animals for hours. The other 4 galleries were also amazing. They showcased all kinds of marine life: penguins, sea lions, sharks, beluga whales, jelly fish and on and on. There were several places where you could touch the animals: sharks, rays, shrimp, horseshoe crabs, star fish and anemones. The whole place was amazing.
We finished up the field trip today with a visit to The Varsity. The Varsity is the world’s largest drive-in restaurant, though we ate inside. Its specialties include such belly bombs as chili dogs, onion rings and fried pies. The specialty of the house is their Frosted Orange drink: tastes just like a creamsicle. Anyone who remembers how long I’ve mourned the loss of McDonald’s fried apple pie will be able to guess how much I appreciated this place! Inside it looks like a 50’s movie. The checkered tile and the stainless steel accents are straight out of Grease. The employees are all wearing paper hats and shouting: “What’ll ya have?” It was delightful. Probably best I hadn’t been there until the second week in town as this could have turned into another Rendezvous Ribs-type situation.
The Varisty
JV
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