Strolling Down Peachtree

As temperatures plumeted here in Atlanta, 35 or so of the Atlanta Flickr Group thought it would be a good idea to go on the first photostroll of the new year. I hadn’t made to any of the official photostrolls last year so, like quite a few others, this would be my first, and it was pretty eventful.

Firstly it involved me waking up at 8:15 to sneak out of bed, shower, get dressed, have breakfast, check the camera had batteries and memory stick, get replacement batteries, pack backpack, remember to wear knee brace, get iPod, get phone and leave… Not an easy task for me, so I left at 9:15, about 15 minutes later than I really wanted and MARTA would make me pay… The walk to the nearest MARTA station usually takes about 10 minutes, mostly due to the complete lack of cross signals on the road leading there, so I usually end up playing a game of Frogger with the traffic… Once in the station, the wait can take as long as 20 minutes, the price for living on the far edge of the northern line? Once on the train it should have taken about 25 minutes to get to the meeting point at Midtown MARTA station, except some genius at MARTA thought it would be funny to dump a full train of people onto the platform at Lindbergh for no reason.

We were told another train would be 5 minutes away, by this point it’s 10am, that when the meeting time was… so 5 minutes pass and sure enough, another train comes and dumps another train load of people onthe the platform, by which time I’m groaning at the prospect of the next train, sure enough, 5 minutes after that a train comes and wouldn’t you know it… It’s full also… God knows how 3 trains worth of people fit into 1 train, but I get the feeling some strangers got a little too close for comfort, luckily I was only going 2 stops.

To cut a long story short, I was late, everyone had left to go their seperate ways, but luckily I wasn’t the only late one, so we became our own group and walked down Peachtree Street, which, due to the weather, had become nothing more than a glorified wind tunnel… We walked as far as the Fox Theater before meeting up with a bunch of people and headed back for lunch, but not before I nearly got freaking knocked down without so much as a “sorry,” or “are you ok?”

6th Street and Peachtree is a one way street, so I crossed when a car started moving onto Peachtree, I was looking down 6th for oncoming cars when I hear a collective “OHHHHH!” from the group as the car that had pulled away decided to reverse into me! No harm/damage caused as it was prolly going at like 5mph (if that) but still, I turn to look at the driver and it’s a woman on a cellphone oblivious about what just occured… And like that *poof!* she was gone. Keyser Soze style. If I had a big tripod, I would have jammed it through the back window on principle alone.

Anyways, 2 hours in the cold had turned all our extremities pretty much numb so a much needed hot meal was due at Stool Pigeons. Though, I can only imagine the shock they had when 35 people had came stumbling in from the cold asking for one big table… Which we didn’t get, but the service was alright.

Anyways, I met a whole bunch of new Flickr people outside of the 5 to 10 I already knew, the names of which I’ve already forgotten (my bad) but check out the diversity of pictures we got today via the 2006aps01 tag on Flickr.

Midtown Photostroll

Originally uploaded by FLC.