Chattanooga! Day 1 - Tenneesse Aquarium

Did I spell that right?  At any rate, in the fall Mark and I wanted to go to Chattanooga for a very important reason.  However, we didn't have a free weekend until recently and um, don't remember what that reason was.  But, we still went to Chattanooga.  It was a nice little vacation, especially now that the kids are old enough to really be fun.  It took us like 3.5 hours to get there and the first thing we did is drive downtown to go see the Aquarium.  The Aquarium is part of a large complex that is right by the river.  It has all these walkway bridges that go over these pretend river.  A great place to run around after being in the car for 3.5 hours.

The Aquarium is actually divided into 2 separate buildings with the Tennessee water life in one and ocean life in the other.  We started with the Tennessee one.

To get to the stop of the building you ride up a LONG escalator.

South Carolina does something similar where it teaches about the different types of water ways in the state.  Some of it is pretty like mountain streams, but some of it is swampy yucky water.  One of the exhibits was with sturgeons, I think, which are these huge ugly fish that are endangered.  They actually had a touch pool where you could touch on.  Yuck.

After the Tennesse theme one, we went to the ocean building which is more of what you would expect from an aquarium.

The coolest thing they had was a butterfly room.  Mark, James, and I were enchanted seeing all these beautiful butterflies up close.

Andy.  Not so much.

Andy's favorite part was the penguins.  He watched them for a long time!

James and I had fun in the shark cage!

After we were done, we walked along the river.  There is a very nice walking path and of course the boys found sticks.

Then we walked across a pedestrian bridge over the river.  This was probably my favorite thing we did.

Then we drove to our hotel and ate dinner at Abuelo's!!  Ahh, I remember when this was just a simple mom and pop restaurant in Lubbock.