Not a lot of driving today, yeah! And we also had one of the best nights of the vacation with Emily only waking up once and I didn’t even knew about it.

We decided to start the day slowly, we stayed in our room playing till about 10:00am until we moved towards the club lounge for a nice breakfast! Best breakfast of the whole trip and we didn’t even need to pay for it.

After breakfast we jumped into our van because we didn’t drive enough the last 5 days. We went to the Phipps Plaza, a somewhat upscale mall, since they had 3 stores we wanted to visit.

First stop the Lilli Pulitzer store, Daniëlle found a very nice shirt. And surprisingly I found the coolest bathing shorts ever!

The next stop was Build-a-Bear, Emily wanted to buy a new dress for Bunny her stuffy. She picked an Aurora dress and wanted to go back to the hotel immediately.

But not we had lunch at Earl of Sandwich and Papa got to visit the Tommy Bahamas where he found a nice pair of shorts.

We decided to go back to the hotel for an afternoon nap, Emily slept from 1-3:30pm but was fully of energy afterwards. Unfortunately that meant that we were a bit later as we hoped to meet the Grebner’s.

It is their last week in Atlanta and we are glad that we got to visit them while they were still here before they move back to Germany. We had a great afternoon where Emily got to play with Julius talking mainly English.

After a while we left their place to visit the Ponce City Market. The market is very similar to the Chelsea Market in New York. Excellent and diverse food choices combined with a crazy selection of different beers and even a meet up with a friend from friends.

We had dinner at a Sezchuan restaurant, the food we selected was delicious but maybe a bit too spicy for some. Emily did well and ate half of a gigantic plate of chicken fried rice.

After dinner was finished we decided that it was time to go back to our hotel. First we walked back to the car and said goodbye to the Grebner’s and just before 10pm we were back in our room.

And somehow we have no luck with Crowne Plaza’s, the housekeeping didn’t visit us and there were no fresh towels…but I got them quickly after I got to the reception.

Tomorrow will be another day full of driving…

What a night, Emily slept in her own hotelbed! Daniëlle and I were lucky enough to get the king size bed. Unfortunately Emily woke up quite often looking for us as she slept behind a 1,5 meter high wall… besides that the beds were not great either.

At 7am we were all really awake and we planned on a morning in the water park but we quickly found our that it only opened at 10am. After breakfast we strolled through the hotel and we kept Emily busy till the pool opened as she was asking to go there since the moment she opened her eyes.

As soon as we entered the pool she took of her shoes and swim cover and wanted to go in the kiddie section. Here she went 2 times from the yellow slides and 9 times from the blue slide. Next step was the wave pool and from there we went to the bigger slides!

When we got upstairs to go down the big bucket dropped over us and that is something Emily does not like so much. But after 10 seconds of being sad it was our turn to slide. Emily went down the orange and I went down the green slide. We didn’t bring the GoPro so no new pictures of the pool today.

From the pool we went back to the room changed in dry clothes, helped mama packing the last items and we jumped in the car towards Atlanta.

First stop was a nearby Starbucks for coffee and a simple sandwich as we were all hungry. Somehow we forgot to get gas and thus we stopped again after 75 Miles, just after we entered South Carolina. Here we learned that they don’t trust people from out of state, I needed to leave my Credit Card as deposit to get 38$ of gas…

From the gas station we had a very exciting…not…drive over the I-85 (this was almost the only road we used today) until just couple minutes before we reached our destination for the day.

When we arrived at the hotel we were surprised the hotel looked amazing and the staff is very friendly and helpful. So far the best of our of 4 hotels this trip. And the already nice rooms are even up for renovations this year. After the first got a room with only 1 bed we ended up getting an upgrade to a double corner room with club lounge access on top.

After settling in our room we went to the Perimeter mall, we took the shuttle based on advice from the employees. It was clearly to far to walk, the shuttle took us, give or take a couple, 45 seconds!

In the mall we met up with Alex (aka No-Alex or No-Juli) and Juli with their friend Kai from Stuttgart in Germany. A little while later Nicole (colleague from work) and her mother joined us for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.

In the beginning Emily was extremely shy but after a little while she got back to being her regular self. And that meant we had a a lot of fun besides our delicious dinner. We had dragons, a lot of phone calls, tickling, cleaning the table and the glass work and last but not least Alex and I were forced to eat directly from our plate by Emily. After a while Emily was tired and wanted to got to bed.

On the way back she was a bit sad as Juli wasn’t with us anymore. Almost weird as she didn’t say a lot to Juli throughout dinner although she was sitting right beside her.

Back in our room we got a call from Angel from the reception, she wanted to give us something from room service. We received a customized cheese and fruit platter for Emily and us. We saved it in the fridge for tomorrow…

And now I’m tired too…but I can’t wait for tomorrow when we meet up with even more friends!