For our second full day in Atlanta, Crystal and I quite enjoyed doing touristy things outdoors. After grabbing breakfast at our hotel, we took a nice walk through a beautiful neighborhood over to Piedmont Park and the Botanical Gardens.

(Just two weeks prior to our trip was that crazy weekend-long April blizzard. Even now, in July, I’m remembering how insane that blizzard was and I just recently saw a reminder that it was only 12 weeks ago. We Minnesotans are so proud of ourselves for having survived that snowpocalypse.)

Like I said before: it was absolutely the best time to be in Atlanta. The air was so fresh! The flowers were so pretty! The smells were so nice!

It was such a lovely place to be, that I even needed to take photos of the sidewalk and bridge details.

I’m glad we had started with the canopy walk woodsy side of the gardens, because I’m not sure I would’ve been able to tolerate the shade after getting all of the vitamin D and sunshine of the rose garden!

The orchid center was amazing, too — of course. Orchids are always so impressive.

In the early afternoon, we were quite ready for some food and drinks and sitting down; we had walked over five miles somehow!

We got an Uber ride over to Ponce City Market, where our eyes and stomachs were a little overwhelmed. How to choose just one restaurant for lunch?! There were so many delicious-sounding options.

We both found a local brew, then headed over to Fish Camp for shrimp po’boys.

We poked around the shops a little bit, but everything was pretty far out of our “fun” budget range. I didn’t quite want to figure out what to do next, so I opted to buy our admission to see what Skyline Park was all about.

There was an elevator ride that lasted a little over a minute, where the driver gave us a bit of a history lesson about the area and the building, and then…

Essentially, you pay admission to go up to the top of the building to pay money to play carnival games or drink beers or just to be seen. I’m thinking admission up to the park is a nice insurance for the cost of old elevator maintenance and to prevent many people from just going up and down for the stunning view and not buying anything else, so I was okay with it. Admission probably made the whole place a lot less crowded. Crystal and I settled on a corner view just outside of the exclusive “The Roof” restaurant, and it wasn’t too shabby.

After drinking many beers we both decided to try out the giant slide, where we got an even nicer view of downtown/midtown Atlanta.

If you’re familiar with Minneapolis, the Ponce City Market reminded me a lot of our Midtown Global Market, minus the housing (I think) plus the rooftop public access.

For dinner later that evening, we decided to check out a restaurant that boasted a phenomenal pie bar, Sway.

We did also get some decent southern food, but we were a bit underwhelmed by the pie selections. Not to say we didn’t eat almost each one of them — we were so stuffed when we left! When we got back to our hotel we were both suffering from pretty intense food coma.

Early the next morning, we had to head back to real life again. It was a great short weekend in Atlanta; a nice intro! I’m looking forward to the next time I can find a good excuse to visit… (I’m looking at you, Eat.Sleep.Knit!)