There are a lot of reasons to visit Atlanta — and I had several. First, I’m an aquarium junky and the Georgia Aquarium is the world’s largest. Atlanta is the home of the Carter Presidential Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, the home of Coca-Cola and Margaret Mitchell. I was in Atlanta for a meeting of the Society of American Travel Writers and what better place to write about.

We came into the aquarium through a back door — headed for a dinner in their banquet room. It was like walking underwater. Changing colored lights turned the wavy ceiling from blue to purple, magenta, turquoise and green. Two of the walls featured huge viewing windows — one into the largest single aquarium in the world, the 6.3 million gallon whale shark habitat, the other into the beluga pool.

I can’t tell you which was my favorite window — I just kept going from one to the other. The beluga whales, which look like they’re made from Sta-puff marshmallows, entertained us with a graceful ballet. One even pressed his head against the window as if we were the exhibit and he the viewer.

The other window looked into the Ocean Voyager exhibit. This giant tank is home to several shark species, sawfish, and schools of tarpon, grouper, cownosed rays, leopard whiprays and Nandi, the only manta ray ever exhibited in a U.S. aquarium. Nandi was only a youngster, just eight feet across, when she was rescued from shark nets off the coast of South Africa. She’s grown a lot and when she glides into view, it’s like watching a giant spacecraft sliding through outer space.

Of course, the stars of this show are the four whale sharks. These are not whales — they’re actually sharks — and not big on manburgers. Although their mouths can be four feet wide, they are filter feeders and eat plankton and small fish.

Which is a good thing, because several of my braver compatriots got in the tank with them. The aquarium offers a “Journey with Gentle Giants” where you can either swim on the surface with an air supply or, if you are SCUBA certified, dive into the tank. They had a great time. I just enjoyed watching the fish from behind the two-foot-thick acrylic window.

After the great view from the ballroom, the rest of the aquarium was almost anticlimactic. It is, however, a marvelous facility. Other exhibit areas include one of the world’s largest coral reef exhibits; River Scout, showcasing the diversity of animals found in the rivers of Africa, South America, Asia and the Georgia coast; Georgia Explorer, an interactive gallery with touch pools and exhibits of sea creatures found off the Georgia coast; and a 4-D theater.

I’m trying to visit all the official presidential museums, so I was anxious to visit the Carter Presidential Library and Museum while I was in Atlanta. It was good news and bad news. I did get to visit. It was raining and we didn’t tour the beautiful grounds. The museum is about to close for several months during which time the exhibits will all be changed, except the replica of the Oval Office. It will reopen on October 1, 2009, President Carter’s 85th birthday.

I found it interesting that there are only two cities in the world who claim two Nobel Prize winners. Johannesburg, South Africa, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, is one of them. The other is Atlanta, with Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King Jr.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site includes the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. were ministers, a Visitor Center and Martin Luther King’s birthplace. The Visitor Center features films and exhibits on Dr. King’s life and on the national struggle for civil rights. It’s hard to imagine what life was like in the past and the exhibits do an excellent job of showing the attitudes and inequities of earlier times. There are many parts of our history we would like to gloss over — segregation is one of them. But exhibits like these are important because our society must be based on honesty — and we haven’t always looked at the “truth” from other points of view.

Right down the street from the Visitor Center is the house where Martin Luther King Jr. was born. It’s an attractive, two-story home, the center of the family and, often, a stopping place for visiting blacks who couldn’t find good accommodations in the city. Dr. King’s sister is still living and has shared a lot of family history with the park rangers who serve as escorts to the property. My favorite story is that her brothers Martin and A.D. used to take the heads off her dolls and play baseball with them. The family wasn’t too poor to buy baseballs — the boys were just being boys.

There’s also a piano in the front parlor. It’s hard to see from the doorway, but one of the keys is chipped. One day, Martin and A.D., tired of practicing, decided they’d destroy the piano. Obviously, they didn’t get far.

The value of touring the Historical Site is that, not only does it bring history alive, it brings Dr. King’s humanity alive. It makes him accessible. We see the little boy, and the teenager in whom others recognized potential greatness; we see how his call to ministry led him into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And we’re thankful for heroes.

ELAINE WARNER is an Edmond resident.