A Surprise, Tennessee Adventure!

I have to begin this blog by bragging on my husband for a second.  Will has some clients in Chattanooga and has told me how beautiful it is and how much he wanted to take me there.  We discussed taking a little three day weekend trip to Chattanooga, and he was finally able to get a Friday off last week so we decided to go.  Although I knew we were heading to Chattanooga, that is ALL I knew!  My stud of a husband planned THREE days worth of activities for us….even had an itenerary in the center console with times and addresses of all of the places we were going.  It made my heart so happy to see how much effort he put into this trip and everything we did were things I had discussed wanting to do at some point with him, not necessarily in Chattanooga. Sweet, sweet guy.

Anyways, we headed out of Atlanta Friday morning to head to Chattanooga. We got there and ate at a yummy BBQ restaurant downtown called Porkers.  We then headed to Ruby Falls.  We pulled total tourist moves with the locations we went to Friday, but it was fun and something we had to experience!  We climbed through the cave at Ruby Falls and got to see the beautiful waterfall.  We then drove through Lookout Mountain to head to Rock City. By the way, this time of year is BEAUTIFUL up there.  The leaves were all so vibrant on the trees.  We did the hike through Red Rocks and got to see the view of 7 states from the top. Truly breathtaking.  We then headed to the incline railroad.  This was absolutely terrifying.  Neither of us really enjoyed being in this old training going straight up the mountain.  We did get off at the top and walking down the street towards Pointe Park.  The street was like something out of a movie.  There were beautiful HUGE homes on the side of the mountain with crisp, fall leaves all over the ground.
For dinner that evening, we went to Blue Orleans.  Will had some amazing jambalaya and I had cajun chicken pasta that was incredible.  For dessert, we went to a cupcake shop where I got a peanut butter cup cupcake and Will got some cheesecake.

The next morning we woke up and headed downtown.  They have these bikes that you can rent for $6 for an entire day! It was a great and fun deal to tour around downtown in the awesome weather.  We rode bikes all the way down to the river to watch the big regatta that comes to Tennessee every year.  Will and I know nothing about crew, so we made some friends that taught us about it and got to see the UGA crew team, FSU, and many other large colleges, as well as high schoolers.  It was pretty fun to watch!  We then headed to lunch and then took our bikes back before heading back to the hotel.  We got ready and went to Georgia Winery for wine tasting.  We got to taste wine, as well as went on a tour of the winery.  We went to dinner after that, and then headed to our final destination for the day… night canoeing! I had been night kayaking in the ocean before, but I was still a little nervous about this.  During the canoeing trip we could NOT stop laughing.  We were supposed to stay as quiet as possible to not scare the animals away.  But we kept running into the banks of the river as well as the walls of a tunnel we had to go under and finally ended up switching seats and were finally able to go straight!  We also went under branches of a tree and my headlamp got stuck on a branch and I had to snag it down quickly.  It was a funny experience!  We did end up seeing some turkey and blue heron, but that was about it.  It was still a really fun time!

Sunday morning, we tried to sleep in, but of course with the time change I was up at 6:50 a.m. We got up and packed up all of our stuff and headed to brunch at Tupelo Honey Cafe.  I got an omelet and Will got chicken and biscuits.  It was a HUGE piece of fried chicken laid across huge fluffy biscuits with gravy.  He said it was amazing but he couldn't finish the whole thing, which is rare for Will!  We then headed to Cloud Land Canyon for the Mountain Arts Festival.  We then headed home and ended our fun and busy weekend!

I definitely recommend Chattanooga to anyone, ESPECIALLY during fall.  It was just perfect and beautiful weather and it was the perfect weekend getaway for us!