Chattanooga Choo Choo!

Marcus and I had an amazing weekend getaway in Chattanooga!

On Friday, we slept in a little bit and left around 11 to drive up to Chattanooga.  We first made pit stops at the bank and gas station, and then another one to drop off the final DVD of Julia's montage with the DJ.  Then we were FINALLY on our way!

We arrived in Chattanooga around 1:30 pm and drove straight to Ruby Falls.  Ruby Falls is one of the attractions at Lookout Mountain, and it is a massive underground cave inside the mountain that contains an amazing underground waterfall!  Before we went on the tour, though, we got some lunch at the little cafe there - we each got a sandwich, and Marcus got some fudge!  Then we set off on the tour.  Our tour guide's name was Martin, and he was HILARIOUS!  You take an elevator down into the cave, and then walk through it in a single file line to get to the waterfall.  The cave is amazing, it has all kinds of cool formations in the rock, and they've given names to ones that resemble things (some examples are: Dragon's Foot, Steak and Potatoes, and Leaning Tower).  It's about 2/5 of a mile from the elevator to the waterfall, so about 4/5 of a mile round trip.  It's always around 60 degrees in the cave, which was a VERY nice break from the upper 90s weather outside!  We could have stayed down there all day!  The waterfall itself was breathtaking.  We took lots of pictures in the cave, and one video of the waterfall.

When we were finished with the tour, we went up to the observation tower for a few minutes to look out at the Tennessee River and Chattanooga.  Then we browsed the gift shop for a bit, and eventually decided we were ready to head out.  By this time it was about 4 pm, so we headed over to our hotel to check in.

We stayed at the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel, which was AWESOME!  They have actual old train cars that have been converted into hotel rooms.  Unfortunately, we didn't stay in a train car room, we just had a regular room.  But we did get to walk around and see all the train stuff!  They also feature "Dinner in the Diner", a dining car where they serve a fancy dinner.  We didn't actually do that either, but we took pictures of the car ;-)

Anyway, we settled into our room and relaxed for a little bit, then headed over to get dinner at the hotel's casual restaurant.  Afterwards, we went to the on-site Model Train Museum, because we had free tickets included with our hotel package.  I wasn't expecting much, but it was actually REALLY cool!  The model train system they had set up was enormous - it filled an entire large room!  It covered the history of the railroads that had gone through Chattanooga, and they had all kinds of clever little setups with the tiny model people and vehicles (not just trains).  We spent about 45 minutes in the museum, then headed down to browse in some of the gift shops at the hotel.  I bought a little magnet for Shosh (she collects magnets, so it made me think of her, lol).  By this time, we were exhausted, so we headed back to our room and went to bed early - we were in bed before 10 pm!

Saturday, we got up around 9, ate breakfast at the hotel (we also had free breakfast both days included in our package), and then headed over to the aquarium.  They had a free electric shuttle bus running through downtown, with one endpoint being our hotel, and the other being right near the aquarium (perfect!).  So we took the shuttle over, then headed into the aquarium.  At some point on Friday, Marcus had discovered that his friend Mike and his wife Heather were also going to be in Chattanooga this weekend, and we had decided to meet up with them on Saturday.  So we called them, and they were already at the aquarium, about halfway through the River portion (the Tennessee Aquarium is divided into two sections, housed in separate buildings - the River section and the Ocean section).  So we headed into the River building first, and kind of sped through the first half of it until we finally caught up with them!  We took our time going through the rest of the River building and all of the Ocean building together.  Being the aquarium snob that I am (having grown up going to the Baltimore Aquarium), I have to say I was pretty impressed.  It was definitely much bigger and better than the Atlanta Aquarium!

At 1 pm, we headed over to the IMAX theater, where we watched a movie about rescued baby elephants and orangutans, narrated by Morgan Freeman.  It was a pretty cool movie, and the baby animals were SO CUTE!  Afterwards, we decided to walk over to where Mike and Heather were staying, which was a little bed and breakfast in the art district.  We went to lunch with them at an Italian restaurant right next door called Tony's Pasta and Trattoria, which was pretty good.  Then we went back to their B&B and sat around talking and playing games for a couple of hours.  Around 5:30, Marcus and I headed back to catch the shuttle back to our hotel, where we showered, changed, and got ready to go to dinner.

We caught the shuttle back downtown and went to a really nice seafood restaurant called Bluewater Grill.  It's apparently owned by the same company as Gordon Biersch, and it was a similar level of restaurant.  Our waiter was awesome and helped us narrow down the MANY menu options we were interested in!  We both ended up getting tuna dishes, and they were both delicious!  After dinner, it was finally cooling off to the point where it was at least comfortable to be outside, so we decided to walk across the pedestrian bridge to the other side of the river, where we went to a local ice cream place called Clumpy's (bad name, GREAT place!).  It was similar to Jake's, for you Atlanta people, basically, they make their own ice cream in house, and they have lots of flavors that they change up every day.  Marcus got cherry almond chunk, and I got chocolate chocolate chip raspberry.  We didn't taste each other's, but we both thought our flavors were delicious!

Then we walked back across the bridge and caught the shuttle back to our hotel.  We went to bed on the early side again, this time around 11.

This morning, we slept in a little bit and got up around 9:30.  We packed our stuff up and loaded up the car, then went to breakfast and checked out.  The drive back to Atlanta only took about 2 hours, which was nice.  We didn't really do much the rest of the day.  We watched the Braves game, and went to Target to pick up a few things, but we're both kind of tired and out of it.  I'm really glad we still have tomorrow to sleep in and go grocery shopping and do our typical weekend things!  Much less stressful than coming back from vacation on Sunday evening and having to do everything that night!

I really enjoyed Chattanooga, and would definitely go back!  It's a great place for a weekend getaway, it has all the amenities (restaurants, museums, etc.) of a city without feeling city-like, and there's a lot of stuff we didn't get to do that I'd love to go back and try.  It was definitely a great investment, and I'm really glad we did it!