The Tennesse Aquarium

Hello again,

Now that was one fine aquarium.

We spent the day here in Chattanooga at the Tennessee Aquarium, and it was a dazzling experience, the kind that leaves you feeling bigger and brighter and popping with a new sense of the earth's marvelous diversity.

Any public aquarium is a window into a realm of life that is usually out of sight and out of mind.....and I have fond childhood memories of visits to California's Marineland, which was always on the itinery when relatives visited, along with Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, the Los Angeles County Museum, and oftimes the San Diego Zoo, too. But the best of the new aquariums are designed to enlighten as well as showcase, and that was certainly the case here.

One of the two main buildings, for instance, begins with a ride up a long escalator. Then you begin to follow the journey of a raindrop as it moves from the mountain streams to the rivers and finally to the sea, experiencing the kinds of lifeforms that live along that raindrop's path, from stream fish and river otters to turtles and alligators and lake sturgeon that can live up to 100 years. There are huge tanks full of huge and various fish, and smaller tanks with astonishing lifeforms such as weedy seadragons and long-necked turtles. One entire room was devoted to the fascinating story of seahorses.

The other building takes you on an exploration of the ocean life on our planet, and while there are no whales or dolphins in this downtown facility (this isn't Sea World, after all) there is a wondrous array of fish life and more. Some of the "more" include a penguin exhibit, and a delightful Butterfly World enclosure, where dozens of different butterfly species from all over the world flit above your head.

As I said, it's an amazing place. We stayed there from it's opening at 10:00 a.m. till 6:30 p.m. - with time out for a lunch at the nearby "Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger".

I took - surprise, surprise - some photographs during our visit, but it's late at night as I write this in our hotel room at the Holiday Inn Chattanooga Choo Choo, so I'll have to share them later. For now, I'll content myself with this shot we took this morning of Wendy on one of the original Chattanooga Choo Choos. Tomorrow we head to the Nantahala National Forest, in the Great Smokies, for two nights of camping. Our highlight looks to be a self-guided trip on an 8-mile stretch of the Nantahala River that we signed up for, a stretch that has class 2 and 3 rapids. It has been a long time since we last paddled a raft through rapids, and Wendy never has, so we'll see how that turns out! We won't have internet out there, so you may not learn the outcome for a few days.

And then, on Thursday, we plan to drive to Nashville for the Olympic Champions gymnastic show. Wendy's really excited about the chance to see Shawn Johnson perform in person.

Talk to you later. Bye for now,

Randy