Stuck inside of Chattanooga with the Nashville Blues Again

You know those days where you wish you could have a do-over?

Welcome to Chattanooga.

But let's begin in a happier place:  Nashville.  (I should specify Nashville, Tennessee - years ago I had a great deal of confusion thinking I was going to a concert in Tennessee when in fact the concert was in Nashville, Indiana.  Yeah, that's sort of an important detail.)

My Uncle Bill and Aunt Connie have lived in Nashville for fifteen years or so, and they set out to prove that Aunt Susie isn't the only Natural Born Tour Guide in the family.  I'd visited Nashville (Tennessee) a couple of times before (and Nashville, Indiana, once), and was only going to be in town this time for basically one day, so they gave me the abbreviated version.

Oh - I need to go back in time one more day, to show you a picture of Abraham Lincoln's birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky, which I arrived at after it had closed for the night.  But here it is from the driveway:

The two best things about swinging by was that when I got out of my car it was really pleasant - probably 50's at 6 p.m. - and I was off the Interstate for a while, driving through some very curvy and fun back roads.  It was a good addition to my drive from Ohio to Tennessee, even if I was too late for the main event.

Okay, back to Nashville.  We saw Musica, the statue by Alan LeQuire.  (Uncle Bill and Aunt Connie live in the historic Richland neighborhood and their house was on a neighborhood home tour a few years ago - LeQuire exhibited one of his other statues in their house for the tour, but they didn't get to keep it.)

Downtown Nashville has some fun buildings, even beyond the Batman Building.

For instance, there is Nashville's first shopping center, the 1902 Arcade which Aunt Connie and I agreed could use a few of those space heaters but otherwise is pretty fun. Some pictures:

We didn't stop to have either sushi or a fried pie.  Or to go to the Post Office, for that matter, but we could have if we'd wanted to.

And of course there is the famous Printers Alley.  (My friend Rachel may be pleased to see that there is no apostrophe in "printers.")

Nashville has a really nice farmers' market (please note the somewhat random placement of the apostrophe - there are a couple of right answers here).  Obviously in February it's (correct use of apostrophe) not very big, but we picked up some honey and I saw carrots bigger than any I'd ever seen.

Then we drove over to East Nashville and saw Saint Ann's Episcopal Church.  It is a fairly small church, but what's interesting about it is that it was devastated by a tornado in 1998.  They rebuilt inside the original footprint and left some of the old stonework, along with these words which I like:  "God was not in the tornado but in our response."  That's actually a pretty Unitarian-Universalist saying.  Except for the use of the word "God," of course.  <insert smiley emoticom here>

Saturday morning I left Nashville - very well fortified after a big breakfast and with enough provisions that I would have been okay if the Vue had been a horse and buggy - and headed southeast, to see Chattanooga.

Three good things about Chattanooga:  South Pittsburg, Ruby Falls, and a great chocolate martini at Terra Nostra wine bar.  Unfortunately, there's no parking at Terra Nostra, but that comes later.

Since at some point I will stop driving around and have a kitchen where I will actually want to cook something, Aunt Connie and Uncle Bill strongly recommended that I stop at the Lodge Cast Iron Outlet Store in South Pittsburg, just outside of Chattanooga, to pick up some pans.  (Mitch told me to get a griddle because it "takes brunch to a whole new level, and also makes a pretty good boat anchor if you happen to need that."  And since I never know when I'll want brunch or need a boat anchor, I picked one of those up, too.)  They make their pans in the U.S. of A. - actually, just around the corner from the outlet store:

Downtown South Pittsburg features the Most Unique Store in Tennessee.  They have a sign to prove it:

This is Opera House Music which is a record store (with genuine records), musical instruments, and a lot of miscellaneous.  It didn't shock me to hear Charlie Daniels playing "Devil Went Down to Georgia" as I walked in.  If you are looking for cluttered, you've found your place.

And somehow the gorilla in the window seems to fit right in.

South Pittsburg has more than Opera House Music, however.  It is home of the National Cornbread Festival which is coming up in April.

It's a cute little town with a number of shops ranging from Miss Jane's Bridal Shop to Base Camp 2-22, which looks like an army surplus store.  I didn't stop at either.  South Pittsburg is also the birthplace of Jobyna Ralston, a movie actress from the silent era whom I have never heard of but they do have a sign.

Last but not least, I thought that this was a cool building on the road out of town.

On the interstate to Chattanooga you see a bunch of signs for Ruby Falls.  That's all they say:  Ruby Falls.  Having seen these signs before, Aunt Connie had looked it up once and saw that it was a large waterfall which the discoverer had named for his wife, Mrs. Falls.  (Sorry, couldn't resist that.)

I'm a sucker for a good waterfall so I checked it out, and it was worth the $17.95 and two hours that it took.

Turns out that Ruby Falls is inside Lookout Mountain and at 145 feet is America's tallest underground waterfall.  You take an elevator into the mountain (when we got out of the elevator, a little kid said, "hey, we're inside the mountain!"), walk about a half mile through stalagmites and stalactites (and, the tour guide said, "stalaglights" - which are where the lights are - I love tour guide humor).  Many of the formations have funny little names.

"Cactus and Candle"

The North End of a Southbound Donkey

The falls themselves are spectacular, and the cheesy lighting and overly dramatic music actually enhances the experience.  You're a tourist down there, after all.  If you were an adventurer you'd be on your stomach in the dark.  In my mind, tourist is much better.  The red in this picture is just from the lighting.

Then a half-mile walk back through the mountain, a seemingly half-mile walk through the gift shop, and it was onward to Chattanooga. 

On the way into town I drove by the International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame and Museum and decided to keep driving since I was on my way to the Tennessee Aquarium.  Perhaps the events of that evening were some sort of karmic revenge for my snubbing this attraction.

The Tennessee Aquarium is nice.  Among downtown development people, it is credited with being a significant driver in downtown Chattanooga's renaissance.  There certainly were a gazillion people there on the Saturday afternoon which comprised my poorly timed visit.  (I love kids in small numbers, and I feel the same way about adults - being part of a very slow moving parade through the aquarium just made me grumpy; I do better at these sorts of places during off-hours.)  If you go, their freshwater/river side is where you'll want to spend more time although the seawater side has a very impressive display of penguins.

I consulted Trip Advisor to see what else I should see, and learned that there is a Confederate Cemetery so I stopped by.  It's pretty large and right across the street from the Chattanooga campus of the University of Tennessee.  I felt weird about something with the purpose of "honoring the Confederate dead."  I've got nothing against honoring the dead, of course, but I just have trouble figuring out what to think about people who did what they thought was right and I think was wrong.  It was a rather unpleasant afternoon, weather-wise, so I didn't stay long but I only saw one gravestone with a Civil War era date.  The rest were people who died later, including a woman who died in 1957.  It would be interesting (probably in a depressing way) to learn about the history of the cemetery during the twentieth century.  My guess - and this is unfair because it's an assumption - is that it was where the white people wanted to be buried.  But who knows?

I'm in the South.  Driving by the Robert E. Lee apartment building reinforced that, in case the Confederate Cemetery was too subtle.  And I know the prejudices that many people have about southerners - and will admit that I, too, am not always above such feelings.  But my basic personality is to ignore the bad until it hits me in the face.  That has its advantages, of course, as well as some obvious risks.  I also tend to follow rules and be respectful of other people's property.

Still, when I was in search of a nice glass of wine before heading to my hotel and saw the Terra Nostra wine bar beckoning in the middle of a weird snow flurry, and saw that the only parking for blocks was at the Walgreens store, it didn't occur to me that the "Parking for Customers While Shopping Only - Violators Towed" sign was a serious threat.  The lot wasn't half full and I was gone less than 45 minutes.

You see where this is headed.

The cabbie - and it's not easy to find a cab at 7:30 on a Saturday night in Chattanooga, in case you're ever in a similar circumstance - was a nice guy named James who was very sympathetic and said that this whole thing seemed like a scam to him.  He said this the minute I told him I needed to go to Gant Towing, not needing to wait for any editorial prompting from me.  I was not his first such fare. 

And let's just say my experience at Gant Towing was reminiscent of the Dukes of Hazzard and I'll leave it at that.

Look, I saw the sign.  It's private property, and the good people at Walgreens can do, more or less, whatever they want to with their parking lot.  I'd be annoyed, too, if my customers couldn't find parking because the lot had become overrun by people using other businesses who don't invest in their own parking lots.  I get all that.

But the lot was less than half full and I was gone less than 45 minutes.  Honestly I didn't know you could even get a car towed that quickly.  Apparently they have perfected towing in Chattanooga (which makes sense, since it's the home of towing which I would have known had I visited their museum.)  Paying $200, however, to reclaim my vehicle (which they had stored for about an hour by the time I got a cab), was just too much and made me agree with James.  (James also advised that the neighborhood around the impound lot was a notorious speed trap.)

In an effort to focus on the positives in Chattanooga, and get a little spiritual balance, I am off to church this morning and then on to Birmingham where I will see another church.  This one is where four little girls were killed by violent racists and by the time I get there I plan to have regained a better sense of perspective.