Check out part 1, about Fernbank Museum of Natural History here, and part 2, about Stone Mountain, here

Now for the last installment in the recap of stuff we did while the cousins were here!

I’m not sure how it worked out that we so much of this visit doing things so terrifyingly high up, and I’m not sure how we all survived the week without falling to our deaths…..but we did and we did.

SkyView Atlanta is a pretty new addition to downtown, and, honestly, kind of a random one. It’s no London Eye. But there’s a lot of stuff in the same immediate area, like the aquarium and children’s museum, and Centennial Park (which I’ll talk about in a minute here), so it’s a nice little extra if you’re making a day of it downtown.

We decided to head here for Amy and Craig’s last full day in Atlanta. Parking turned out to be nearly as frightening as the ferris wheel itself. There’s plenty of parking in the area, but a lot of it is in the form of little, confusingly laid out lots with tight fits to get into the spaces. I hate parking. I pulled out of one such scary little lot and immediately found a metered space on the street. I liked this much better (and there were plenty of them free within a few blocks of the ferris wheel when we were there, which was mid day on a weekday).

I thought the prices for SkyView were fairly reasonable; $13.50 for adults, $8.50 for kids 3-12 (Abe was free). It wasn’t very crowded at all when we went and we only waited a few minutes. I could see the line getting very long on a busy weekend day, and, honestly, I wouldn’t want to wait terribly long for this.

Maybe also because it wasn’t very busy, we were on that thing for FOREVER; by our count, we went around seven times. Abe was very impatient about it by the end, though he started out loving it. Our group was split into two gondolas; if you’re there with a small party, you might have to share one with another group.

It was a smooth ride, and we only stopped near the top a couple of times, so I did a good job of not feeling as paralyzed with fear as I might have. I was in one gondola with Amy, Ari, and Abe (wow; I was the only one whose name didn’t start with an A!); Craig and the other kids took the other one. Abe thought it was the best thing ever that he could see his brothers and cousins in the other gondola. He was very into the whole thing until about the fourth time around. I think everyone had a good time; I feel like it was worth it to do once, but I’m not itching to go back anytime soon.

So this is your view from the top (the other direction is mostly just the sides of buildings):

That’s Centennial Olympic Park; it was built for the 1996 Olympics, hence the Olympic ring shaped fountain. My friend Joel and I watched the gold medal handball match at the ’96 Olympics, because that’s the sport we could afford tickets (from a scalper) for. It was very exciting. Croatia won. I think.

Anyway, after they finally let us off the ferris wheel, we went across the street to the park to let the kids play in the fountain for awhile. They got very, very wet:

We should have brought extra clothes. There’s a burger/ice cream place in the park, where we waited in the slowest line in the world and bought the kids shakes and ice cream. The kids would have been happy to hang out in the park longer, but it was getting dangerously close to rush hour, so we hurried back to our easy parking space and back home.