885. Atlanta, Fulton County (GA005)

Welcome to Hotlanta, the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, the so-called Capital of the Black America.  Despite what Donald Glover would lead me to believe, it was not the most surreal place I’ve ever been.  Of course, I was looking for perhaps the least surreal experiences one can imagine.  I immediately ran into the problem of not knowing which building I needed for my photography purposes.  The county courthouse was more of a superior court building that doesn’t run the county, but I think the county clerk’s office was there.

On the other hand, the government center across the street contains the offices of the Fulton County Commissioners, so it may have a better claim to being where the county is based.  While I offer both photographs for your edifications, it doesn’t really matter because neither could be the political center of gravity.  Not when they’re three blocks away from …

… the Georgia State Capitol.  Impressive.  Add one more golden dome to my list.  From there, I took a detour to pick up a famous grave.  At one particular graveyard, I could have picked up the graves of golf legend Bobby Jones, author Margaret Mitchell, and singer Kenny Rogers.  However, I don’t really care much one way or another about any of them (though Rogers would have gotten the highest honors of the three, based on my personal famous grave classification system).  While there were a handful of other graves I would have liked to visit, only one was truly worthy of the trip.

Ladies and gentlemen (or however you identify. I don’t mean to be gender assumptive), I give you the final resting places of civil rights leader, political and economic philosopher, and Nobel laureate the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his wife, civil rights leader and author Coretta Scott King.  Technically, they do not rank highly on my famous grave classification system (which I will no doubt go into one day, probably when a famous grave is integral to a cache, though I never have before…), but that is a outlier of the system and no fault of their own.  Though I do not hold King as one of my personal heroes (the highest ranking of the system), I cannot possibly respect anyone in the city of Atlanta more than him. 

I was spending more time in Atlanta than I had planned.  Normally it’s no big deal, but having a hard time stop (sunset) along with waypoints I needed to meet complicated things.  I had to get moving and that meant finding a cache.  Looking for a cache, I noticed a Virtual nearby so I went ahead and checked it out.  What kind of crazy Stonehenge things was that?  An unexpected art installation, that’s what.  Once I was finished with it, I still had to find another since the Georgia County Challenge requires physical caches.

I found a quick one on a guard rail, a tribute to the CO’s first date with his partner.  That accomplished, I looked at the rest of my schedule.  I ended up having to cut out a few counties, but it was no sad affair; I had realized my timetable for the day was (somewhat uncharacteristically) horribly over-optimistic.  I mean, I can be optimistic, but I could only meet my original goals if I started in the area before sun up and went around all day and into the evening.  Since I didn’t get to Cumming until mid-morning and had a hard stop at sunset, that was a negative, Ghost Rider.  I made my cuts and then continued on.  I had one more stop to make in the metroplex in the sort-of suburb of…