I Speak Whale!

For those of you who don’t know who these guys are the above title will mean nothing.  Go out and get a copy of "Finding Nemo", no matter your age you’ll love it.  Why do I bring them up?  You see, this weekend we went to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga.  Unfortunately I did not get to use my whale-speak skills as they do not have whales but they have everything else.  It’s unique in that they have two separate buildings, one ocean habitat and the other a fresh water habitat representing the rivers of the world.  They have penguins, sharks, our little friends Dora and Nemo and for a bonus a butterfly garden that’s truly amazing.    

We had the added pleasure of going with our dear friends from Florida, Nancy and George.  They went way out of their way on a trip to North Carolina to come to humble little Ringgold and stay a few days.

The aquarium complex also includes an IMAX theater where the four of us took in a short movie.  The feature film on our visit was "Born To Be Wild" which highlighted the efforts to save endangered elephants in Africa and Orangutans on Borneo, with Morgan Freeman narration goodness.  It was a great way to spend a rainy Fourth of July.



Friday, I got rained out of work so we all decided to visit the nearby Chickamauga Battlefield.  This sprawling battlefield memorial south of Chattanooga is operated by the National Park Service and chronicles the battles fought here that resulted in 1,657 Union soldier fatalities.  The Confederacy lost 2,312.  All of this in just two days of fighting.  It’s awe inspiring to stand there and imagine that just 150 years ago these decisive battles were waged where we stood and just 20 years after the war both sides came back together in peace to conceive the memorial and construct the dozens of monuments here that stand to this day.  It’s set up to tour in your car with narration from a phone number you call on your cell phone.  They also have a very impressive museum.  It would take many days to actually see everything they have here so we may go back and look at it some more, maybe on our bikes but on a drier day.

The visitors center at Chickamauga Battlefield

They say you can’t go back home but home came to us.  It was great to see George and Nancy and we look forward to dropping in on them in their new home in the North Carolina mountains real soon.  We hope everyone’s Fourth of July was filled with fun, friends and a few fireworks and not as soggy as ours was.  We’re looking forward to going back to Chattanooga in the coming weeks to explore more of the city, visiting the famous riverfront and looking for that choo-choo.

Until then.

Kevin