What Atlanta Moms Really Want for Mother's Day
We know you’re busy making deals, so we made you a cheat sheet of five ways to treat your mom (or your wife) to a special Mother’s Day. (The easiest one is to take her out to dinner to her favorite restaurant, like our Dallas reporter—far right—with her mother-in-law, sister-in-law and niece at Flip Burgers in Buckhead.)
Your special lady will make all her friends jealous if you get her a pampering package at The Spa at Mandarin Oriental. There’s a Mother's Day Escape or World's Best Mom package available through the end of the month. We recommend the Peaches & Cream Journeys, which includes a skin softening apricot kernel exfoliation before a massage using warm cream and peach oil. The treatment ends with a red clay scalp massage to soothe all the stress away.
Go catch a show at the historic Fox Theatre and then don’t worry about driving home by staying at the Hotel Indigo across the street. Does she like old music? Brian Wilson and Culture Club are on the schedule. If she’s a foodie, treat her to an evening with Anthony Bourdain. And, maybe the best to come are the comedic singers Straight No Chaser. The colorful boutique Hotel Indigo is a great way to cap off a special evening with a little reminder of how she became a mom.
If mom wants to spend the day with the whole family, Zoo Atlanta has nearly 1,400 animals (including the sleepy red panda pictured), representing more than 200 species from around the world on almost 40 acres in Grant Park. You can also stay indoors and get a feel for sea life at the Georgia Aquarium in Downtown, which is one of the largest aquariums in the world with more than 100,000 sea creatures including the only pair of captive whale sharks outside of Asia. The aquarium opened in 2005, funded mostly by a $250M donation from Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus.
Admit it: no matter how long you’ve lived in Atlanta, you haven’t taken the CNN studios tour. Does your wife (or mom) have a raging crush on Anderson Cooper? See if you can spot him while brushing up on how the news is covered at the first 24-hour news channel’s studios and HQ.
If mom loves sports, take her to check out the College Football Hall of Fame. Here’s the wall of all the college football helmets in the US. When you arrive, you can pick your alma mater and light up that helmet on the massive wall for the day. You can follow your favorite players and teams in this hands-on experience that even lets you be an ESPN Game Day analyst. (And, if you want to do more than one of these excursions, grab mom a CityPass for a discounted ticket to all.)
