The Almost Intrepid Adventures of LibraryAnn: Oh, Chattanooga Choo Choo!

Chester Frost Park Campsite

Our view

My late husband passed his love of trains on to our kids by taking them places like the Chattanooga Choo Choo. When Ben was about 4, we decided to try our first long distance trip as a family. Ben was in love with the Great Smoky Mountain Railway video Greg ordered from public television but we couldn't find a room anywhere nearby as there were 100 federal marshals in the western mountains earnestly searching for Eric Rudolph. So we took the kids to Chattanooga. We stayed at the Choo Choo, at the time a Holiday Inn, which was a hotel created from the old train station, and took them to the marvelous Tennessee Aquarium after visiting a local train museum. Greg also took them to ride the Incline Railroad to Lookout Mountain. She who is afraid of heights stayed in the room that day and learned from the news that US embassies in Africa had been bombed and all the federal marshals had abruptly left for overseas. I booked us a room and we road the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad through the Nantahala Gorge on the trip home, marveling at the woods deep enough to hide a man from the marshals and craning our necks hoping for a clue that might earn us the $1 million reward on his head.

Jessie just turned 30 and we are back in Chattanooga to revisit those memories and on our way to make more in Hot Springs, AR. We are staying in Hixon, TN in a lakeside campsite in lovely Chester Frost Park on Lake Chickamauga. Jessie's dog, Franklin, and my Odie are with us and mostly being civil.

Entrance Rock City

On our first day here we visited Rock City, a place I had not been. Jessie enjoyed it on a solo trip to the southwest. It's a natural boulder formation on a mountain top just over the Georgia State Line. You really can see 7 states from Lover's Leap. It was developed in the 1930s by a real estate developer who is noted for inventing miniature golf, and his German wife who had a penchant for preserving local plant life and illustrating German fairy tales with garden gnomes. So it's a lovely, natural garden among striking rock formations punctuated by creepy gnomes ending in a black light show of fairy tale illustrations. Odd but interesting.

Tennessee Aquarium

Today, we had lunch at the Choo Choo and visited a much larger Tennessee Aquarium. Traffic was heavy and parking was expensive (and the aquarium wore us out there was so much to see) so we did not explore much of the riverfront walk except to make it to the pedestrian bridge traversing the broad Tennessee River.

We are resting up for a long day tomorrow, probably driving in wind and rain, to our Hot Springs campsite. Enjoy the pictures and remember you can click on any of them to enlarge them for closer viewing.