Day 27—ATL and The Varsity

So the question we had was: Can you make it to The Varsity with a six hour layover in Atlanta?  Like a lot of folks, we watch Diners, Drive-in, and Dives, and had seen The Varsity profiled, so we thought that sounded like a good destination.  (In hindsight, I wish we had called our friends John and Liz and had them take us to a really good chicken and waffle place). 

We arrived at ATL from Panama at 1:30 pm.  Even though our bags were going to be checked through, we still had to pick them up and take them through customs, and then turn them back over to a Delta person.  I have to say, they have it extremely well organized, and we made our way through customs easily.  (I’m not sure if it would go as quickly if you were smuggling, say a kilo of cocaine, or a Cuban cigar.  But we weren’t, so it was all good.) 

We looked at the airport map, found the MARTA station, and hopped on the airport Plane Train (By the way, they had a contest to name the automated people mover.  What, did a five year old win?)  It was a quick ride from one end of the airport to the other.  We got off and looked for signs for Marta.  As we were passing the point of no return (the point where you have to go through security again), I asked my family, “Are you sure you want to do this?” But since we had oodles of time (I wish I could be more precise than this, but I got caught up in the journey, so I wasn’t looking at my watch) we went ahead and headed out. 

MARTA was pretty easy to figure out since we have a very similar system in the SF Bay Area (BART). I was looking for a chart of how much the tickets were going to cost us.  When I couldn’t find the information, I asked a MARTA employee (a gentleman who was clearly employed for just such questions).  It turns out that it is a flat amount: $1.00 for the Breeze loadable card, and $5.00 for the round trip fare.  So we paid $18.00 total for our little trip.  Note: If we had more time and wanted to make more stops, an all day pass was $9.00 per person. Since the Airport is at the end of this line, the train just sat for a while, and slowly filled up until there was standing room only.  Another interesting thing is that everyone was talking to everyone.  I guess it was because everyone had just gotten off a plane, and so people automatically had a conversation starter.  It was a fun ride.  It took about 20 minutes to get to North Street, which was our destination. 

When we exited the station, my first reaction was that it was so much less muggy than Panama, but clearly just as hot.  It took a couple of minutes, and the intense heat started to get to us.  We were having trouble orienting ourselves because we had came out of an exit between two streets, so we didn’t know which direction to head.  I was trying to use my iphone GPS, but we still didn’t know which way to head, so I simply asked a nice man on the street (because, ya know, he spoke ENGLISH--sigh of relief), and he pointed to some flags, and told us to cut through a parking lot, and we would be there.  And he was correct. 

This was a short 2 block walk, but the heat was intense.  We had to make basecamp in the shade of the parking lot before proceeding .  It reminded me distinctly of the fish and mango day in Panama.  IT WAS HOT! 

We finally got inside the relative coolness of the restaurant.  I was surprised at how big it was.  There were many lines, all of them were fairly short.  Now, one of the catchy things the servers are supposed to say is “What’ll ya have!”  Unfortunately our server was less than enthusiastic, and sort of mumbled it.  Sean decided to be gentleman and order for me, but he ordered incorrectly, and get this, the guy had to have a supervisor come over to void out the original order, before he could put a new one in correctly.  Bizarre!  Man, I'm pretty sure they trust McDonald’s employees more than this.   

Emma was in another snit (because people might be able to see her eat), so she refused to tell me if she wanted fries or not.  I decided just to order the onion rings.  (We were splitting the two chili cheese dogs meal).  She did mumble something about wanting a weird orange drink (Varsity Orange it’s called), so we got her one of those.  Sean got the two chili coleslaw dogs.  I tried to take a picture, but for some reason, my family declared that it would be embarrassing, and refused to let me take a picture—Really? After all the pictures I snapped in Panama, including a bathroom stall, they are finally embarrassed!

The food was mediocre at best.  I really did not care for the chili at all. (Which is weird, because it is so popular they sell cans of it!) The hot dog itself was fine.  The best part of the meal were the onion rings.  They were some of the best I have ever had.   Even Emma, who “hates onion rings!” ate half the order.  I’m glad I cannot get these on a regular basis!

I just checked the time stamp on the picture I took there.We were eating lunch at The Varsity, an hour and fifteen minutes after our plane landed.  Not bad considering we had to go through customs.  It took about thirty minutes to order and eat, and then another thirty minutes to get back to the airport.  Our flight was scheduled to take off at 7:40pm.  I think we got back to the airport close to 4pm.  We found out that we had to print our boarding passes before we went through security.  Thank god I asked, because let me tell you, security at the Atlanta airport was ridiculously long, but it is a huge airport.  It had lines wrapped around other lines,  that turned weird corners, so you never really knew how close you were to getting out of the horrible maze.  It was like Disneyland gone wrong, because after waiting for an eternity in some god forsaken line, at the end of it there wasn’t a jungle cruise, instead there was a bunch of snippy looking TSA agents just looking for an excuse to do a body cavity search!

It took us about 45 minutes to get through security.  Our gate was in Concourse A, and by time we got to there we still had at least three hours to kill before our flight. Ugh.  At this point I had been awake for 11 hours, and we still had about eight hours ahead of us before we landed at SFO.  My back was killing me, so I tried to schedule a massage at the airport spa, but I timed it all wrong, and they were so backed up, I didn’t get a chance.  I was willing to pay any amount of money to sit in a comfortable chair, and have someone rub my neck and back. Apparently so were a lot of other people.  

It was a grueling day to say the least.  I don’t think I will ever schedule flights like this again. 

But to answer the question, Can you leave ATL and go to The Varsity? I believe you can if you have a minimum of 3 hours before you have to check in for your next flight.  Will you want to?  Well, a lot of folks love The Varsity, but as I mentioned earlier, we will seek out a good ole’ chicken and waffle place, if there is a next time.