Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 2, We Looked at Art and Walked across a Bridge

 

When I was planning Matt's birthday trip, I was actually looking for ideas more around Nashville, because I'm still paranoid about both of us traveling too far away from our nearly grown-up teenagers. It's probably very Smother Mother-ish of me, and I don't even care.

But then I saw a TikTok about the fantasy art exhibit at the Hunter Art Museum, and THEN I Googled and saw that there's also a free-play pinball museum there, and a few weeks later, there Matt and I were in Chattanooga!

I really wish we'd done more than drive through Chattanooga when the kids were small, because they would have LOVED IT HERE. On our morning walk to the Hunter, Matt and I passed the Tennessee Aquarium--

--including a plaza out front with a free splash pad and wading stream meant to resemble the Tennessee River just north of it.

We followed the stream past the aquarium, then turned down The Passage towards the Tennessee Riverwalk--

--and found an equally beautiful and interactive memorial to the Trail of Tears and the experience of the Cherokee Nation:

There were interpretive signs for all the symbols, and you could enter the stream at any point, walking down the steps towards the river in a graphic representation of the Trail of Tears.

At the bottom, there was another wading area. Children could play here, in this gentle reminder of former tragedy, and families could enjoy their time together here. 

I love it when spaces overtly defy the intentions of the original acts of cruelty that led to the need for a memorial.

It was a cloudy day for the Tennessee Riverwalk--

--but nevertheless I was stoked, because the forecast had told me it would probably be pouring all day. We hardly got rained on at all, so yay!

THIS is why we came to Chattanooga!

Matt and I both love fantasy fiction. He loves fantasy video games, and I used to play D&D like mad (I'm a half-elf bard at heart, y'all), so this was the BEST exhibit for us!

Prince Valiant is still running, and it is so good!

This is Grendel's Mother, by Yoann Lossel, because fantasy art isn't all dragons and skeleton pirates:

But SOME of it is dragons!

I don't think I owned the D&D guide this art was on the cover of, but I've definitely seen it and used it!

This artist, Scott Fischer, also did the cover of Peter Pan in Scarlet:

And look what else I found!!! DINOTOPIA!!!!!!!

The family love affair with Dinotopia is a long one, and I'm always thrilled to see Dinotopia in the wild! I've just learned that James Gurney actually sells prints of his Dinotopia art, and OMG I want them.

It was really fun to see all these illustrations from beloved books. Here's an Arthur Rackham illustration:

I've got his illustrated Alice in Wonderland, but I think of him more as a fairy tale illustrator.

And here's an illustration from The Lost World:

We did The Mysterious Island as a family read-aloud one magical year, and I remain nostalgic for all things Arthur Conan Doyle.

Here's just the "do not touch" sign at the base of a giant Bigfoot bust:

And here's the skeleton pirate I referenced!

That's another James Gurney illustration. 

This exhibit was presented by the Norman Rockwell Museum, because apparently Normal Rockwell was really into fantasy art. I went to the museum's website to buy the exhibition catalogue and accidentally got completely sucked into learning more about Norman Rockwell and his art--I thought of him as a painter of schlocky sentimental subjects, but then I watched this virtual exhibition of his Civil Rights art and now I'm hooked. 

After looking at every single thing in the Enchanted exhibition twice, we eventually made our way into the rest of the museum and looked at the rest of the American art!

self-portrait in a fancy plate

Diamond in Milk by Amber Cowan, using thrifted, upcycled, and found glass

Efflorescence, by Judith Schaechter

Under the Sun, by Andy Saftel

I found a quilt!

Black Star Family, First Class Tickets to Liberia

This is so timely, because I recently met with one of my Girl Scouts who's working on a Gold Award project about introducing more Bipoc authors and artists into her classical school's curriculum. We had a great discussion about the politics and power dynamics involved in determining whether an artwork or piece of literature is "canonical," and one of the examples that we discussed was types of art that aren't traditionally recognized as such, but are still art, like quilts. I'd been thinking more about the Gee's Bend quilts when I brought up that example, but here's another quilt!

I really like the details, especially the use of netting and tulle to add shading to parts of the quilt:

Matt laughed at me for taking pictures of the seating, but you guys, this is what it is to be known!

Seriously, why are museums so freaking exhausting?!? You're just walking around really slowly and standing a lot! WHY AM I SO TIRED AND MY FEET HURT?!?

Rule #1: When you find a mirror, you take a selfie!

I'm a bad vacation photographer, because I think this is our only photo together during the whole trip. Oops!

I did take a lot of photos of Matt, though. Here he is becoming art!

I also pestered the kids by constantly sending them pictures of art that they'd think was funny. Like, here is literally a photo of Matisse:

His muse was apparently 500 pigeons!

And here's an actual photo of me when I get some bread:

When we eventually made it out to the sculpture garden, I was happily amazed to see that it still wasn't raining on us!

And that meant that we could achieve my afternoon plan of walking around the sculpture garden--

--and across the Walnut St. Bridge!

There's the Hunter Art Museum behind me:

Matt does not like to stand near the edge of things, but he consented for this one photo:

Another view east, with the Hunter and a little island in the middle of the Tennessee River:

And the view west:

We didn't go over to this carousel, but I love seeing another antique carousel out in the world being used and loved!

I was VERY sad that the restaurant I'd been hoping to eat at had a sign on its front door saying it was closed for remodeling, so instead we went to a Mexican restaurant so I could eat a quesadilla and drink a spicy margarita.

My spicy margarita was super deliciously spicy, and the waitress said that the bartenders infuse the tequila with jalapeños to make it. So now I have another project for my to-do list!

Don't tell the kids, but afterwards we did a tiny bit of shopping to fill up their Christmas stockings:

Did you know that Chattanooga is the home of the Moonpie? I think Moonpies are gross, but the kids are thrilled by them, so we brought them home a bundle.

Fun Chattanooga street art:

After a while the clouds were starting to look more looming, so we walked back to the hotel to read, nap, swim, and eat leftovers for dinner. 

And then we ate at the most touristy ice cream shop in the country:

I promise that I did have some local, indie, authentic ice cream shops pinned on my Google Map, but Ben & Jerry's was both closer and, when we got home and I told the kids where we'd eaten, they acted like we had gone to the White House and shaken Daddy Biden's hand, they were so amazed and astounded that Ben & Jerry's! Has a real storefront! Where you can get Phish Food in a waffle cone!

Never let it be said that we do not live large on our grown-up vacations!

Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 1, We Drink Moonshine and Learn about Boy Meets World

For Matt's 45th birthday, I decided to take advantage of having two nearly grown teenagers who can drive themselves to school and work and cook their own meals and keep the house tidy and presumably handle any small emergency that arises, and leave them alone at home to do just that while Matt and I took ourselves on a quick little road trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee!

Okay, fine. I'm still seething with jealousy at the super fun trip Matt and Will took to Peru and I wanted to go on a super fun trip, too, but my children are too busy to go with me and the only way I could get Matt to take off work for yet another vacation was to tell him it was his birthday present. Ahem.

And I had an absolutely wonderful time, thank you very much! I leaned fully into the road trip aesthetic, with car snacks and 1,000 podcasts (we ended up binging Pod Meets World, because who doesn't love Topanga?). Matt drove the entire way, leaving me more time to peruse the handfuls of travel brochures that I gathered at every rest stop. I now have a collection of brochures for every tourable cave between here and Georgia, and one day I AM GOING TO SEE THEM ALL!

I missed the kids terribly, but I texted them photos of every cute dog and gas station novelty food I saw:

If the kids had been with me I'd definitely have gone for these.

We'd also have 100% bought ourselves $1 Slurpees. Instead, I bought myself a 59-cent soda and a bag of Sour Patch candies that was ALL CHERRIES!

It's a six-hour drive from here to Chattanooga, but there are a couple of interesting-looking distilleries about halfway there, and we enjoyed our last distillery tour so much that we picked one to stop at. 

Casey Jones Distillery offers a guided tour and a bourbon tasting, and we wisely did the bourbon tasting first so that we wouldn't be too tipsy to drive, although it did mean that we didn't know as much about what we wanted to taste as we would have if we'd done the tour first. But even without the full history lesson we'd get during the tour, I got a kick (both a "Kentucky hug" and a historical thrill!) out of tasting Casey's Cut, the original moonshine recipe that the original "Casey" Jones developed when he was a moonshiner hiding out from the revenuers. Matt really liked this one, and that's actually what we ended up buying a bottle of. 

Casey Jones Distillery is a LOT smaller than Member's Mark, so it was interesting to see the contrasts during our guided tour. The history of how the two companies developed is also completely different, and although I had been interested in hearing about the scientific process of choosing the perfect grain combination, I was flat-out fascinated hearing about the history of illegal moonshine production in rural Kentucky. I'm amazed that economically and educationally disenfranchised people could have figured out the chemical and mechanical requirements to create stills from scratch, with no blueprints or written instructions, but Matt noted that many Kentuckians had emigrated from Scotland, with its own history of whisky, so possibly there was some word-of-mouth instruction or even memories of that process. In the 1600s, Scotland even had its own version of revenuers and black market whisky manufactured in small, hidden stills!

I wish the kids could have come with us on the tour of the working still, because look at all that lovely fermenting bacteria that Syd could have seen!

Hmmm, maybe we should try to catch some wild yeast and make our own sourdough again. That would be another good culinary extension to her biology study!

Here's an original Casey Jones still. He built it for the FBI, at their request, after his imprisonment and subsequent retirement, and it's now a display piece above the distillery's bar:

And here's a working model of that still, a copy built by Casey's grandson, AJ:

This is the still that makes all of the bourbon sold by Casey Jones Distillery. They were running the still while we were there, so we got to watch the glass jugs being filled--

--AND we got to taste some moonshine fresh from the still!

Casey Jones doesn't have a rickhouse or big bottling area like Member's Mark. Here's its storage and bottling area in one:

We got another history lesson just on the handcrafted wooden barrels used to age bourbon:

The cooperage will even fire the inside according to the distillery's specifications, and it's the burnt inside of the barrel that colors the finished bourbon:

You can apparently buy used staves, complete with the burned side and the devil's cut of bourbon saturated inside. Our tour guide said they're awesome for smoking meat.

It probably didn't help that I was tipsy, but I got SUPER into the history of moonshining and its impact on the local economies here. Here's a display of artifacts that I pored over:

And here's a $35, spiral-bound, self-published book written by Casey Jones, himself, that I REALLY wanted but did not buy:

It was so awesome. It was essentially all photocopied from original typewritten pages, and the preface consisted of Jones, with lots of spelling errors and grammar mistakes, writing about how now that he was old he wished he'd taken his education more seriously, but also, it was brilliant and had such a vivid authorial voice. My favorite kind of outsider art! I had the thought that maybe I could interlibrary loan it when I got home, but of course it has no ISBN or Worldcat or OCLC entry. I'll just have to go back to Hopkinsville one day and buy it!

After the distillery, we were both starving and frankly, I was still a little tipsy, so we ate barbecue. It was freaking delicious, and I'm still sad that I ate so much pulled pork that I didn't have room for pie. 

On a previous family road trip years ago, we very briefly detoured into Chattanooga, but it didn't help us with wayfinding AT ALL. Genuinely helpful was our hotel's location just across the street from a minor league baseball field, and imagine my delight when at the conclusion of that evening's game, they had a fireworks show!

And because I'd planned the trip, I'd been able to pick a much nicer hotel than Matt would have been happy springing for. BUT it was in easy walking distance of almost everything we wanted to do and was super roomy and comfy.

Matt definitely made fun of me for having my name on the TV, though...

And I got to text the kids to show them that no matter where you go, you'll always have an Office marathon!

When my Girl Scout troop was in Montgomery, Alabama, some of the kids had really wanted to order Mellow Mushroom pizza, but it was closed. I was excited, then, to see that not only was there a Mellow Mushroom in Chattanooga, BUT it was open AND it was only a couple of blocks from our hotel!

Unfortunately, it tasted really gross, soft and almost undercooked:

Good thing I had the foresight to pack all those car snacks!