Friday 5/27 Atlanta to Asheville

This morning we packed up and said good-bye to the very neat, kitchy Hotel Indigo, with its European-sized bathroom.  Before leaving Atlanta, we headed to the Martin Luther King Jr. national historic site.  There was a lot to see there, and I came away feeling like we should perhaps have spent more time, which we just didn’t have.  There was the visitor’s center with an exhibit and film, the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church (as well as a newer, larger, more modern one built right across the street), the MLK Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and the house where Dr. King was born and raised, all up and down Auburn St. (or Sweet Auburn, as Dr. King affectionately called it).

Wow.  What a place, what a man.  I spent an awful lot of time in the visitor’s center exhibit reading everything.  We’ve all grown up and learned the basics about Dr. King, his life, and his legacy, but I realized how little I really knew about him, or the civil rights movement to be honest.  I was really struck at the portrayal of him as a living man, rather than a hero on a pedestal, the challenges his faced during the civil rights movement, the sacrifices made by him and his family, and the times when he almost gave it all up (can you imagine?).  It also was eye opening, all the stuff about the rampant racism in our country, especially in the South.  Not to say that racism isn’t still alive and well in the U.S., but the stuff that went on in the first half of the 20^th century is just so inconceivable to me, not having lived through it.  As we went through the Center for Nonviolent Social Change, looking at exhibits about Rosa Parks and Ghandi, I had some other thoughts start to float to the surface, but never really made it there, about all the nonviolent (or attempts at nonviolent) demonstrations going on all over the Middle East and Northern Africa in the “Arab Spring” this year.  I would love to be able to get Dr. King’s take on those events.

We also visited his and Mrs. King’s graves—very beautiful.  We walked up Auburn St. to his birth-home.  We weren’t able to take a tour, as the next available one was pretty late, but the visitor’s center had a neat kiosk with a 360 degree photo tour.

We also visited the Ebenezer Baptist Church.  Man, if walls could talk….  They almost did, as they had recordings of Dr. King’s sermons, and various folks singing, and playing the organ.  I was struck by how much smaller and more intimate the church actually is in real life—it just always looked pretty big to me in the pictures. 

So with a lot to think about, we got in the car and headed for Asheville, taking the scenic route through the edge of the Great Smokies, much to my delight, Morgan’s frustration (we were on a four-lane divided highway, not a four-lane limited access interstate), and April’s stomach’s dismay.  I wasn’t going mention the snit that this led but everyone else has, so why not?  April announced (10 miles from our destination) that she needed to use the restroom.  Thinking that she might be more comfortable in a reasonably clean and much more private hotel room bathroom rather than some nasty gas station bathroom, I asked if she couldn’t hold it.  Obviously this was the wrong question, for which I paid dearly (other motorists on I-40 might have noticed my head rolling down the road).  Suffice it to say, it was a quiet ride the rest of the way into Asheville.  We were back on speaking terms by dinnertime, however, and decided to indulge in some more of the much-enjoyed Mellow Mushroom, which conveniently also has a location in downtown Asheville.  After dinner we strolled around town a little bit, taking in the uber-crunchy atmosphere of Asheville.