Coca-Cola, CNN, Man vs Food, ATL! USA!

6th of September

Big day ahead! We left our hotel around 10pm and set off towards Atlanta. It took about 20 minutes to get into the centre and we turned off towards Coca-Cola world. We parked up, the parking was $10 for the whole day so we were just going to leave our car there for the whole day and explore.
Coca-Cola world beckoned! It was a massive complex! A total Mecca! After purchasing our tickets we asked two American girls to take a photo of us infront of the Coca-Cola world sign, to prove we were there, check out the photo those idiots took!

The whole point of the photo was to have the huge massive Coca-Cola sign in it!
Anyways we walked into the main entrance and immediately we were inundated with Coca-Cola branded memorabilia and art, it would pretty much be like this the whole way through. We got an introductory talk from one of the Coca-Cola’s employee’s named Falisha who gave us a brief history and showed us some of the most impressive Coca-Cola artefacts. Like the original soda fountain bowls and vending machines from around the world etc.

We were walked into a movie theatre and shown a movie called ‘the happiness factory’ it was supposed to be what happens inside a vending machine when you put your money in it, it was an extended version of their advert on TV. The full brainwashing experience.

They had a cool selection of exhibits from Coca-Cola art to the history and making of Coca-Cola, my favourite was the history of Coca-Cola and also the Cola tasting room where you could taste different Coca-Cola brands from around the world. My favourite worldwide brand was perhaps the watermelon soda from China. They had one which was supposed to be from England called Kinley’s Lemonade, but I have never heard of it. My overall favourite was actually just the Cherry Cola which was in the originals tasting section, all the Coca-Cola was free.

We got a free limited edition Coca-Cola world bottle as we exited and then we spent about 30minutes in the shop, it was one of the best gift shops, America does gift shops well! Everything you can imagine had a Coca-Cola brand on it! I wanted to buy everything! But instead I just got a Coca-Cola polo.

We then went for a walk around the Olympic park, Atlanta had the Olympic games back in 1996.

At the end of the park was the CNN building, we initially walked in to get some air-conditioning because it was so hot! But where we were in there we noticed that they had a massive food court which was handy because we were also looking for food. We went to Arby’s and got a beef sandwhich, I ordered the beef and blue cheese burger and she miss heard it as the bacon and cheese burger, so that’s what I got stuck with, Paolo had the all American burger, which was basically a whopper but with sliced beef instead of a burger.

The CNN building was a brilliant surprise, we got tickets for the tour of the building after lunch, this was the main CNN building in the world, 60% of all their broadcasting was done from within those walls. We got the tour and managed to watch some live broadcasting and see how the system works, the news rooms etc. they said no pictures but I still took some ☺

We walked around Atlanta for a few more hours, saw the Georgia dome, and also drove up through some really nice area’s in uptown. We then prepared ourselves to take on a Man vs Food challenge! At other Man vs Food places we have been to they have always been the segments before he does an actual challenge, well this time we were going for one of the challenges. If we had called ahead then we could have entered in for the opportunity to win $250 but we didn’t. The place was called Big Pie in the Sky Pizza, and it was incredible! We ordered the 30” pizza, 30 inches! Check out the picture, it was massive! You may think that a pizza this size perhaps skips on quality, but oh you would be wrong! I’m not one to say this lightly but it was much better than dominos pizza, the toppings were delicious the pizza was just mouth watering! To be honest the wait was murder! While we waited for our pizza and everybody else’s around us came, we were beginning to be a bit apprehensive because there were families of 5 or 6 huge Americans coming in and they were only ordering the 25” pizza and leaving some! It smelt so good! Which added to the anticipation.
When the pizza came, I cant over emphasize how big it was! People were staring at us and couldn’t believe that just two of us were going to attempt to eat it.

Check out the look on the people's faces in the backround!

I was completely expecting it to be a struggle to eat, but when it came the smell and the taste helped a handful to make it go down. By the way this was called the Carnivore challenge, it was topped with a pound of ground beef, a pound of pork, a pound of pepperoni, a pound of beef sausage and obviously cheese! This was truly an epic moment in my life! I wish I lived around the corner from this place. After we left I was feeling great! I ran around the car a couple of times, only because Paolo was having problems moving, perhaps there is something wrong with me, I cried a little as we pulled out with our car, I may never return…

We decided that instead of finding a place to stay immediately we might as well save the time tomorrow and do the majority of the driving to Lynchburg that night, if we were in a hotel we would only be spending this time watching TV anyways. I can conclude that over the 1100 miles or so that we have done so far that Americans in general are bad drivers and you can multiply that by 10 at night!

After about 2 hours of driving we ended up pulling into a comfort inn about an hour from Lynchburg, Paolo managed to bargain down the price of the room by 20%! We had a long day and a lot of food so we dropped off to sleep.