I have a curse. Any time I drive more than an hour south of Chicago in the winter, I hit a blizzard on the road. I’m 4/4 on winter road trips, and in every single one of these cases, my drive home is 100% clear. All that is to say that when I recently took a road trip to Atlanta, I most certainly hit a nasty blizzard in Indianapolis that cost me a few hours.
The good news is that this time, we were early enough in the blizzard that the accumulation on the road wasn’t too bad for most of it. And after we hit the border between Indiana and Kentucky, it was smooth sailing.
Zooming out for a second, the road trip itself was a mission to get to Atlanta. On the way down, we passed through Indianapolis & Louisville, staying overnight in Nashville, although without enough time to do anything there. After Nashville, we stopped in Chattanooga, playing an escape room game on the famous Chattanooga Choo Choo train before driving to our destination near Atlanta.
We stayed near Atlanta all week, hitting a few escape rooms as well as the impressive Georgia Aquarium. On the return trip, we started with a detour to Huntsville, AL for the US Space & Rocket Center, stopping at various points like a mountaintop market in Mentone, AL. We played an escape room in Huntsville before heading north to pit stop in Nashville again.
For the second go-around in Nashville, we played two games at Escape Game’s flagship location, including the monumentally impressive Hidden Ruins game. We spent the rest of the day driving to Fort Wayne, IN. On the final day, we headed home from Fort Wayne, stopping only at a miserably bad escape room in northern Indiana.
I’ve been to Atlanta a few times prior, and I’ve always flown. The decision to drive was out of concern that the flights to Atlanta, while still cheap ($66 round trip as of when I needed to book, and often cheaper), were subject to the whims of the airport and airline, and I’ve had some bad luck with weather-based delays and cancellations lately. With a number of attractions on the way, I was eager to see what we could experience on the road trip.
A few takeaways, or pins on the board for what I need to hit on my next trip through the area:
-We need to visit at least one museum in Louisville or Nashville
-We need to visit at least one major cave, perhaps the one under Bowling Green, KY that runs under the town itself!
-The area of Atlanta near the Braves park has as much to do as Disneyland and is a home run area to stay for a laid back vacation
-In Chattanooga, you can stay in a converted old train car at the historic train station- how cool is that???
-I missed out on a few big attractions to the east of Atlanta (the touted escape rooms at Escape Artist Greenville, Biltmore, Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge)
As for the things I did hit, outside of escape rooms, the Georgia Aquarium and US Space & Rocket Center are both amazing experiences. The Georgia Aquarium’s exhibit with whale sharks and manta rays is the showstopper – I continue to be impressed by how they create an exhibit with so many different viewing positions that can’t be seen from other viewing positions, making for a truly special view from every angle- you don’t have your view of the animals spoiled by people on the other side of the tank.
The US Space & Rocket Center has one of the most impressive collections of space artifacts outside of Kennedy Space Center, including a full Saturn V rocket, a prototype space shuttle, and an Apollo capsule. While Kennedy Space Center focuses mostly on the stories of the astronauts and mission teams, the museum in Huntsville has more of an emphasis on the engine designers, so the experiences aren’t redundant. Space enthusiasts should definitely plan to visit both.
As far as escape room highlights, overall we had a very good trip. I’ve heard lots of buzz about the Hidden Ruins game at Nashville specifically, and we weren’t disappointed – it became a fast favorite, and Christina thinks it may be her #1 favorite room out of the 400+ she’s done. I’ll write separately on that experience later, but it hit all our marks on satisfying puzzles and a cool, cinematic set that throws some really cool surprises at you.
Winter road trips can be a gamble, and it feels like we maybe brought the cold weather with us to Atlanta, but it was still a wonderful experience. Atlanta is a great vacation destination because in addition to the city of Atlanta itself, heading two hours in just about any direction yields another world-class attraction. Looking forward to our next visit already!
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