GA Day 2 - Ribs and Return Trips Home

Today was the day I put the brakes on this little adventure and flew home for the holidays. That meant that the day started with furiously paced last minute packing and car cleaning that probably should have happened sooner. 

I felt bad that I wasn't really going to have much of a day to spend in Georgia today, so I figured if I was  only going to be able to do one thing I'd have to make it count. So I went to the original JR Crickets. JR Crickets is a local chain that was able to keep expanding and expanding almost entirely based off of how good their chicken wings are. The main reason it was extra on my radar though is that gets featured in the excellent TV show Atlanta. I don't know if you can get more text book Atlanta than that, unless they're also name dropped in an Outkast song (which could be entirely possible, I love Outkast but I cannot pretend to be a huge connoisseur of their whole catalogue). 

I had a tough time deciding between the famous wings and their BBQ spare ribs, so I figured what the hell and got a combo plate of both. $15 for 10 wings, fries and quarter rack of ribs. It doesn't get much better than that, and I figured I had all of my tim at home to start eating healthier. It was a perfect, sloppy mess, completely earning the phrase finger licking good. The wings were the right amount of hot without being overwhelming, and the ribs were an excellent balance of sweet and savory. I can see how they earned their local landmark status. 

From there, I took a Lyft to the airport. I had a really good interesting conversation with my driver. He was second generation Mexican, but also the first person I've met on the trip to just outright say they liked Donald Trump. I've met a fair number of conservatives, but they were always more on the "well I just couldn't vote for Hillary" side of things. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with most of the places I go to do comedy and sight seeing being college towns or big cities which tend to lean liberal wherever you are. I'm sure I've also met people who did outright like Donald Trump and it just didn't come up, because why you go and ruin a perfectly nice conversation by bringing politics into it one way or the other?  I actually really liked talking to the guy though, because he had a good sense of humor and we both listened to each other. I knew the odds were that neither of us was gonna convince the other to change our minds, but neither of us really tried and it was more of a light hearted conversation. He did say a big issue for him was that being lower-middle class, he and his wife got really crushed by Obama-care and that was a big reason he voted Trump. While I don't think getting rid of it completely was the right call at all, it is a good point that serious changes needed to be made if we were really gonna put the "affordable" in Affordable Care, and this was a point that Dems did tend to overlook (possibly because they were too busy fighting to keep it at all). The one big thing we did agree on though was that too much partisan-ship on either side has got to go, and that real positive changes aren't gonna happen until both sides start working together. 

The Hartsfeld-Jackson Atlanta Interantional Airport has been ranked the world's busiest airport by traffic since 1998, so I was glad I got there pretty early. It's roughly the size of small town, and I had to take a train inside the airport to get to my terminal. One interaction I really liked witnessing was a woman asking for directions to the TSA checkpoint and then immediately trying to open a door to a restricted area only to have the airport employee start laughing and say "Why would I have told you to go through the restricted door?"

When the time came to take off, the fact that I did not get a morning coffee meant that I slept essentially the entire time from take off to landing but I did get this nice aerial picture of a parking lot.

When I did land, it had been the longest time I've been away from Massachusetts in my entire life, but it was good to see somethings never change:

From there, I met up with my parents for the first time since New York, and I went home. I was gonna miss the adventure of everything, but it was a good feeling to be home.

Favorite Random Sightings: A place called Four Ticks ; Plane Train; Kid Port

Regional Observation: I didn't see this personally, but my younger cousin who was also flying home from Atlanta today from basic training said that the Atlanta has things called Smoking Aquariums where you can smoke in the airport. I'd never heard of that anywhere else.

Albums Listened To: Margo's House by Jim Palana (a nice little bootleg of my dad with songs that aren't anywhere else.) Marquee Moon by Television (one of the best punk guitar albums ever); Mashin' Up the Nation by Various Artists (an early compilation of ska-punk from around the US before it really took off in the 90s)

People's Favorite Jokes:

Woman at the Cash Register in the airport shop: "The real joke. Today I saw a guy with pink hair and a cowboy hat wearing a tutu at 8 in the morning. (I absolutely love that to her the time of day makes this crazier, because it's both completely true and not something I would have thought of)

Songs of the Day: