First we stopped at Bea's, where you sit in a big round table with strangers and eat off plates stacked on a lazy susan in the middle of the table. These plates are PILED with fried chicken, fried okra, potato salad, cole slaw (no, not like yours mom), beans, pickled beets (first for Andy) and cherry pie. Oh, my stomach is aching a little just talking about it, but it was excellent.
Next stop, ART (of course). Actually, Chattanooga has quite the art scene with lots of public sculpture as well as an great American art museum, the Hunter. Although they have the standard collection of early American landscape paintings and boring portrait paintings (apologies to the art snobs among the audience), the museum also has a great collection of contemporary art
Plus, the building is pretty cool.
After all of that, we took in some seafood, wandered the town and had a generally good time observing the many high school proms that were taking place throughout the city, from the art museum to the Creative Discovery Museum to the convention center. Nothing makes you feel quite so glad to not be a teenager anymore; I recommend it!
The next morning, we headed up to Lookout Mountain early in the am to catch the views before the tourist flood.
Of course, Civil War history abounds,
Next stop was the aquarium. Now, I'd like to say, after living in Boston for many years, I've been to one of the nicest aquariums in the world. BUT, but....wow. Chattanooga's aquarium (the Tennessee Aquarium) is the largest fresh water aquarium in the world as well as having a great salt water collection as well. 
(This is the part where I got really brave and touched a shark and a sting ray.)
(No, that's not the one I touched.)
The fauna is so diverse!
Finally we thought we should head on down the road toward the Magic City but made one final stop at the Chicamauga Battlefield, where we learned more about how hotly the control of Chattanooga was contested in the Civil War. In these battles, 47,000 soldiers died. The battlefield was created in 1890 "to preserve and commemorate these battlefields". Every unit that fought there was invited to create a monument or snippet of information that was placed at the site of action.
Not wanting to back track (silly us) we decided to try out some smaller state roads to get back to B'ham. We made a wonderful discovery of Cloudland Canyon State Park in Georgia,

which may be the destination of another short trip before too long!
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