Chattanooga Trip

Well, we had an interesting trip to Chattanooga, TN.  We went to the Tennessee Aquariums, the children’s museum, Rock City, and Ruby Falls.  With stops at the Riverchase Galleria in Birmingham coming and going.   We met up in the local Kroger parking lot at 6:30 a.m.and left around seven a.m.  Rachel set with her friend Maya, and I sat with Maya’s chaperone, her older sister, Lindsay. The trip was long and of course they showed movies again to occupy the kids.  I really don’t like watching movies, so that was difficult because you could not get away from them–there were screens at almost every fourth seat.  Very annoying.  But it is what it is and I survived pretty well.

We got to Birmingham and stopped off to eat, then it was on to Tennessee.  We got there four p.m. their time and saw the aquariums, which were amazing.  Rachel’s favorite exhibits were the penguins and  the live butterflies.  We had a butterfly land on my jacket and not want to fly away.  So they got to observe him up close and personal.  Other exhibits included petting the  sturgeon, lakes from around the world, and  one whole floor of nothing  but jellyfish.  So the girls enjoyed that immensely.

Then we went and ate dinner at the children’s museum (pizza) and got the run of the place after hours; we were the only group there. Typical children’s museum fare–a floor dedicated to the arts, another dedicated to engineering, and a rooftop playground where they played with physics until it got too dark to see.  That made for a late night, and we got to the hotel around  10:30 p.m. and crashed 🙂

The next morning, we set an alarm for 6:45 a.m. but slept in until  7:30.   Then we got breakfast, packed and loaded onto the buses for Rock City and Ruby Falls.

I had been to Rock City several times, the first when I was child around five ro six, and I always remembered the Fairytale Caverns.  The wife of the original owner loved European folklore, so her put in the caves of the rock carved dioramas of various fairytales and lit them with blacklights to make the colors more vivid.  And there’s a whole room under the rocks that illustrated about twenty nursery rhymes as well.  OF course, the original rock formations were amazing as well.  .

Then it was on to Ruby Falls. I had never been there, so that was a completely new experience.  We went down through bedrock in an elevator then walked a quarter mile through rock paths to see the falls.,  We aw some more amazing rock formations on the way to the falls, but nothing prepared us for the sheer grandeur of the falls themselves. They were illuminated with lights, and I stood there and sang “How Great Thou Art” to myself as I watched the 145-foot falls gush out of the wall into a small lake underground below 1160  feet of bedrock.    Leaving it was hard to do, but we went back up to daylight and to the buses.  A long trip back, and we came in at 11 p.m. our time.  All in all a very good trip with my little one.