Aquaholic: 6/26/18 - Tuesday - Hales Bar Tn to Erwin Marine (Chatanooga Riverfront)

Two mornings in a row of Erik sleeping in past 6am! This boating business must be tiring 🤪
We got the day started with Renee doing some more school work while Erik cooked breakfast of omelettes, bacon 🥓 and toast. We wanted full bellies so that we could make the fairly short cruise (32 miles) to chatanooga and be ready for some exploration of the city when we arrived.
We departed Hales Bar at about 8:30am. The Nickajack Lake has a much different look and feel than the past couple of lakes. It has definately become more of a river; still pretty wide but not many coves or wide open expanses of water. The surrounding landscape has also turned into a much more impressive array of maintains and valleys. It was very beautiful cruising today with perfectly flat waters and gorgeous views of the surrounding mountains. The river is also very windy leading us in every which direction. As we got close to Chattanooga the landscape did flatten out some and things became a little more industrial.
We arrove at Erimwin Marina at about 12:30pm and got settled into our assigned slip quickly and got some advice from the harbor master about where to go and what to see. We walked up the riverwalk and into downtown. We briefly walked into the Tennessee Aquarium (very nice and renown) but decided that we did not feel like paying $30 each to go in since we had many other sites we wanted to see and thus did not feel we’d get our monies worth for the time we wanted to spend. Instead, we jumped on the FREE electric bus transportation and took it to its southern most stop which was at the historic Chatanooga train station (Chattanooga Choo Choo!). This was an interesting stop. It is now a hotel, but also has historical placards explaining the history of the station and the railway as well as many of the old engines and train cars still on the tracks that now serve mostly as shops and restaraunts. From the station we walked across the street and got Ben and Jerry’s comes...yum! We got an Uber ride up to Ruby Falls (about 5 miles up Lookout Mountain). The Falls are quite impressive and we highly recommend this tour. The cave and falls were discovered by Leo Lambert (maybe a long lost Cuz??) in 1923. After about a .5 mile walk through the cave you come to a point where you are approx. 1100 ft below the mountain and it opens up into a huge cavern/room with a nice large waterfall that is 160 ft tall. Very cool. Also there at Ruby Falls was a lookout tower that had impressive views of the city and the Tennessee River basin below. There is another local attraction called ‘Rock City’ that is at the top of Lookout Mountain and is supposed to have even more impressive views and many other sites. We may do this when we return to Chatanooga for the July 4th holiday.
We Uber’d back to downtown and to a 5:15 AA meeting at a downtown clubhouse. It wa s a good meeting in a rough area of town with quite a few ‘low bottom’ alchys and addicts. A much appreciated meeting after a couple of weeks with no meetings for us. We took the free shuttle back to the marina area and went back to check on the boat and cool off for a few minutes while letting phis charge. We met a nice couple in the dock who are live aboards. He is a marine mechanic and she makes canvas biminis and enclosures for boats. They just finished up a 6000 mile trip on the large (48’) Jeffferson Yacht.
By the time we finished talking with this couple it was 8pm and we were just headed back up to The main drag to get dinner. We chose a reccomended Italian restaraunt. About half way through the 3/4 mile walk the skies opened up with a vegence and DUMPED buckets of rain. We sought cover under a nearby bridge. I stuck my thumb up at the first car passing by and was picked up by an older veteran gentlman who brought us to what we thought was the correct restaraunt; it actually turned out to be a coffee house next door. During the run next door to Tonys we got soaked :-(. The restaraunt turned out to be an excellent choice. It was delicious and reasonable. The rain stopped (almost)?by dinners end and we had a nice leisurely stroll back to the boat on the riverwalk.
There is obviously much more to see and experience here in Chatanooga aobwe plan to make reservations for two additional nights of dockage on July 2nd and 3rd. The cities main fireworks are on the 3rd. Looking forward to retuning here on our way back down from Knoxville.