Bike Tour Atlanta, Part 3: Pop Culture Edition

Finishing up my series on the great bike ride I recently enjoyed from Bicycle Tours of Atlanta (here are parts 1 and 2), this installment looks at some great entertainment options that happened to be in town while we rode.

First up, courtesy of my guide Robyn, is me taking a photo of a theater called the Variety Playhouse in the hipster neighborhood of Little Five Points, where my favorite new band, Girls, was playing. Unfortunately, my flight was leaving for home in a few hours. I would go on to miss Girls play in D.C. a few nights later for some similarly lame excuse.

Next, we wound our way downtown, where we had lunch and wheeled past the famed "fabulous" Fox Theater, where one of my son's favorite kids groups was set to perform. If you aren't yet familiar with Yo Gabba Gabba!, watch this bit with Jack Black.

And finishing out my blog bike tour, we stopped by the Martin Luther King National Historic Site, which is a large complex not far from the spot where the bike tour leaves from, in the Old Fourth Ward. Two highlights were seeing the wooden wagon MLK's coffin was carried in as part of his funeral march, and the gentleman in the photo who serenaded Robyn and I with a song of faith.

Bike Tour Atlanta, Part 2

As I mentioned in the first part of this series about my excellent bike tour of Atlanta, Georgia, biking was the perfect way to experience all the best parts of the city.

My personal guide Robyn was kind enough to send me this set of photos that she took. The first one is me riding towards the state capitol, then a couple of me in front of some of the city's impressive pop-culture graffiti art.

Atlanta Rocks: A Personal Bike Tour, Part 1

I attended a conference of about 170 marketers from The Nature Conservancy (of which I am one) a couple of weeks ago. The conference was really interesting and fun, and I made lots of connections to people in my network. It was held at Chateau Elan Winery (made famous in this video and lampooned on Family Guy) about 40 miles northeast of Atlanta in Braselton, Georgia, a town that Kim Basinger once invested in with a since-failed plan to turn it into a movie-making locale.

Anyway, I intended to do more networking with a four-hour bike ride organized as part of the conference. But when I arrived downtown at the funky Bicycle Tours of Atlanta (pictured above to the left), I was the only one to show, which made for a great personal tour by my guide Robyn.

I'll take us through several sites of Atlanta, which I always thought of as a cold-hard batch of skyscrapers plopped down along Interstate 95 somewhere between North Carolina, New Orleans, and Florida, over the course of my next several blog posts.

One of my favorite stops was Oakland Cemetary, where legendary golfer Bobby Jones is buried. My favorite site there, however, was Margaret Mitchell's grave (pictured to the right). She basically supplied me with everything I've ever known about Atlanta through her classic novel Gone With the Wind. We also later biked past the spot downtown where her life was cut tragically short by a car that hit her as she crossed the street.

Finally, for now, we stopped in the lovely Central Park-like Piedmont Park, with its wide expanses of recreation areas and beautiful views of the skyline (pictured to the right).

Exploring cities I've never been to on bike is by far the best way to experience them. Why more people haven't discovered this travel trick is beyond me, and I wish my 20 or so colleagues who had signed up for this trip would have joined me. Then again, because they didn't show, I got to see many more sites.