I’m a big fan of slow travel and this blog is normally about finding the lesser-known spots, the undiscovered finds, and the joys of making connections when we travel. Sometimes you’re going to be a tourist for a few days though, especially when you’re in a city you haven’t visited and you want to check out the big attractions. That’s what our family of three did recently when using the Atlanta CityPASS.
I lived in Nashville for many years and it’s where my daughter spent her first ten years, but now she is a young adult living in Atlanta and we wanted to check out the city with her. So we went for the “go big or go home” approach and mixed dining out and a couple movies in the rental apartment with a few days touring some major sites.
I don’t always think these attraction passes are a good idea. If you’re going to be taking your time and only seeing one thing a day, they’re not worth it. But if you’re packing a good bit of sightseeing into a compressed period, they can save you a nice sum of money. More on that calculation at the bottom, but here’s a taste of things to do in Atlanta that we checked out.
The Georgia Aquarium
I’m probably going to make a few people angry with this statement, but the Georgia Aquarium is the most impressive one I’ve even seen. I’m not a young man and I traveled lots of places with my daughter, so I’ve probably been to twice as many aquariums as your average human. I’ve been to three just in the past two years too, one of those in Thailand.
This one is extremely well done and has the biggest variety of creatures under one roof I’ve ever seen, including massive whale sharks and hammerheads! Add in otters, beluga whales, jellyfish, otters, dolphins, and penguins and you’ve got hours of wonder in front of you. Not even including the albino alligator.
One aspect that makes this Georgia Aquarium stand out is the sheer amount of space the water creatures have for moving around. When a swimming whale shark looks like he has plenty of room to move, we’re talking about some big tanks! We watched a school of fish making a moving formation while two chilled-out sharks cruised by and that was not the biggest tank. That grand one, filled with manta rays and tiger sharks, is several stories high. The aquarium has 30 million gallons of water, which is hard to wrap my head around.
I also like how they contrast this with some freshwater areas and have plenty of signage about both what you are seeing and what the environmental story is for that area. It would be a great intro for kids (there were plenty of school groups chattering away) but I learned a few things too.
Full Admission to the Georgia Aquarium could be as low as $25 if you book ahead and come after 5:00 on a weekday, but there’s variable pricing the rest of the time and the normal price for admission is $65. So a $94 CityPASS is two-thirds paid off with just this visit. They’re open 9-9 weekdays, 8-9 on Sundays, 365 days a year.
World of Coca-Cola
While I left the aquarium feeling educated and awed, I was glad I wasn’t laying out a lot of money for the World of Coca-Cola because it kind of feels like a giant ad that you have to pay for. Especially in the beginning when you sit in a movie theater and watch…a long Coca-Cola commercial that’s supposed to pull at your heartstrings and start you off on a feel-good note.
I think it’s probably more interesting to foreign visitors than it is to most Americans. We’ve been bombarded with Coke ads our whole lives. We’ve seen the vending machines, we’ve heard all the jingles.
The museum takes you through the entire history, from the “secret formula” to the design of the iconic bottle to the ad history. There are all kinds of fun displays about all of this, all very wholesome. There’s a big production about a giant vault that the original formula is locked up in, with more than a few visitors uttering the words “coca” and “cocaine” amongst themselves.
There’s nary a mention of tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, and garbage, the overwhelming byproducts of the brand’s growth. As the product went from a rare treat you got from a soda fountain or a small returnable bottle to an everyday consumption in big single-use bottles that will never decay, there’s been a dark side that the executives clearly don’t want to address.
Two aspects of it were travel-related though. First, there’s a room showing various Coca-Cola logos from around the world, on signs and in advertisements. Then eventually you get to go into a tasting room and drink all the sugary concoctions you want to try. It’s a dizzying array of familiar, unfamiliar, and just plain bizarre soda flavors from the various brands that Coke has bought up or developed over the years.
There’s just one drawback to that tasting room: the floors get stickier than those at a dive bar at closing time, despite the people with mops making the rounds.
The World of Coca-Cola costs $21-$24 to enter, with weekends generally being the higher price. That includes guided tours of various areas and the tasting room. It is open 10-7 weekdays, 10-9 on Friday and Saturday.
National Center for Civil and Human Rights
On a more serious note, you walk from the brash commercialism of Coke to the real struggles of minorities in the USA and abroad. This museum has a big mission, maybe too big for the current space, to open our eyes to the basic struggle of human rights and freedom.
I was glad to see that they are adding on because for now it feels like a story that’s only partly told. Much of it is devoted to the history of slavery and the fight for equality last century, with a lot of emphasis on the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s after the March on Washington where Atlanta native Martin Luther King made his famous, “I have a dream” speech. This part is very well done, with bios of the people involved and all the struggles that went into it all. (Check out the movie Rustin for more depth about what led to that day.)
Memorial for the Birmingham KKK church bombing that killed four girls in 1963
One part I wanted to check out but couldn’t because it was too crowded was the lunch counter reproduction to show what happened with black Americans staged sit-ins. They have headphones you can put on where you can listen to racist bigots spew insults and imagine what it would have been like to be in their shoes. Plenty of elected bigots make an appearance with quotes on the walls as well.
Then one section is devoted to MLK’s writings and speeches, giving a fuller picture of the man before you head into the area where you can see him speak in TV footage.
Another is devoted to the international struggle for human rights. This highlights genocidal events and shows where ruthless dictators have gained power and killed thousands or even millions. With the ascent of current dictators like Putin, Lushashenko, Bashar, and Maduro and almost-there ones like Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Erdogan, and Nicaragua’s Ortega, it’s easy to see how fast a country can go from bad to worse when one man refuses to give up power. This Freedom House map of human rights is updated yearly:
For now, this is an eye-opening museum that’s good, but not what it could be since it is a time capsule more than a reflection of what we are struggling with now after living through four years of Trump and his right-wing Supreme Court. There’s nothing about Black Lives Matter and the years of protests over police killings of black youth like George Floyd .
In the international room I didn’t see anything about the struggles that have caused so many Central Americans to head for the Mexico/USA border, only to face another round of nightmares once they get there. The oppressed Palestinians and the Uyghurs get barely a mention. There’s so much oppression around the world that it’s hard to give much of it a fair showing.
The Atlanta Civil Rights Center costs $20 and is open 12-5 most days, 10-5 Sundays, and is closed on Mondays. Reservations requested for most visitors, not necessary for CityPASS holders. See more info here.
Fernbank Museum of Natural History
All three of the museums above are steps away from each other and there are places nearby where you can grab lunch. If you want to visit the Fernbank Museum of Natural History though, you need to take a drive or call an Uber/Lyft/Taxi to get there and back.
There’s a reason it’s outside of the urban core though: the exterior nature section of the museum is larger than the inside part. When you arrive, you see three big velociraptors out front and that’s an indication of things to come. Dinosaurs are the big attraction here, both in appeal and in size. The center rotunda room has a reproduced skeleton of a Argentinosaurus that weighed 100 tons, a Giganotosaurus, and various pterodactyl skeletons suspended from the ceiling as if they’re flying around.
We also caught a 45-minute movie about the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex and it was a good one, going back and forth between a dinosaur dig and animated sections showing what life on Earth was like for them during their prime period–including the parenting part. There are a few other displays with bones and explanations but this is not an extensive museum.
Head out back and there’s a nice elevated walk through the wood on several levels, offering a pleasant stroll in nature to breathe some fresh air and get closer to the natural world.
The Fernbank Museum of Natural History costs $26 normally and is open 10-5. Unlike with downtown attractions and the zoo, parking here is free.
Places We Didn’t Visit
The CityPASS includes a visit to the Atlanta Zoo. If we had really been trying to get our money’s worth out of the pass we would have gone to that, but it was blazing hot out and seeing animals in captivity didn’t get any of us very excited. That costs $26 to $32.
By picking the two optional items that we did, we also missed out on the College Football Hall of Fame. Since I watch college football about one day a year (always a big bowl game) and my wife and daughter not at all, this would have been a snoozer for us. If you’re more into this sport than civil rights or natural history, make your choice accordingly. It’s close enough to the aquarium and Coca-Cola center that you could do all three with one day of parking if you had ample energy.
Getting to the CityPASS Attractions in Atlanta
I used the CityPASS when I was in San Antonio and as with a lot of cities, the attractions included were rather spread out. In Atlanta, by contrast, you could get to four of the museums without ever getting into a car and braving Atlanta’s notorious traffic. These attractions are around 22-acre Centennial Olympic Park.
You can find parking in plenty of places nearby, but you can also take the MARTA metro and get within 10 or 15 minutes by foot for $2.50. All MARTA lines will get you there: just get off at Peachtree Center, Civic Center, or Dome/GWCC/Philips Arena/CNN Center stations. This way you could even stay out at the Atlanta Airport and come in for a day hitting museums.
Getting to the zoo is tougher, requiring a 30-minute walk at the end of the metro ride to get to its Grant Park location. Otherwise you need to navigate the bus system and make at least one change. The Fernbank Museum of Natural History is well outside of the city center and requires four wheels to reach.
The CityPASS Cost Savings
If you buy a CityPASS and use it to its full potential, the maximum savings would be almost 50%. We skipped the zoo though, so our results were not so dramatic.
The total price for one pass is $94 so it’s $282 for three adults. If we had paid the regular walk-up price for all the attractions, our total would have been $135 X 3, or $405 total instead. That’s a 30% savings and hey, $123 saved in not exactly pocket change. Plus we would have had some lines to wait in. With the CityPASS I just swiped through the three QR codes on my phone and we walked right in.
If you go the zoo, you get even more out of it, but if you remove even one of the items we went to from the mix, the cost savings would be minimal. So make sure you’ve got the stamina for two or three days of sightseeing before you go this route. You may think you can visit three or four places in one day, but you probably won’t when the time comes, especially if it’s a hot day.
Overall, this worked well for us. Get your Atlanta CityPASS here or check prices at the main site for other cities they serve.
Perceptive Travel Blog posts sometimes contain affiliate links, which won’t cost you any more than if you went direct, but we earn a small commission on sales that helps support the site and allows us to provide free content.
