America 2015: Day Twenty (18 August 2015)

We're Mountaineers, we're Volunteers
We're the Tide that rolls, we're Seminoles
We're a herd of Longhorn steer
We drive Ford and Chevrolet
Cheer 24 and 88
We crank up our music Friday nights
On two thousand country stations
Yeah, we're one big country nation, that's right

                                                                                                                   - Brad Paisley

Tuesday 18 August

Sadly, we left Nashville today, but our tour of Tennessee isn’t over. Not yet! We drove east towards Chattanooga – about two hours’ drive time, but we cross over into the eastern time-zone for the first time since New York City way back in the first week of the trip; that feels like a lifetime ago now – which saw us arriving at around 2:00pm.

We ran into quite a fair amount of rain throughout the journey, and some roadworks and a traffic accident thrown in for good measure. It appears that we’re destined to get a slowed-down view of America by way of sitting through immense traffic jams. We had traffic in Chicago, back from Milwaukee, down to St Louis and now here. A trouble-free run wouldn’t go astray sometime soon…

Thankfully, there’s a Taco Mamacita here in Chattanooga (and if you don’t know what that is, you obviously didn’t read yesterday’s blog!) which we headed for as soon as we were done checking in to the hotel. I’m telling you, there’s no taco place like this, and they definitely get huge marks from me for substituting those hard taco shells for something that’s a little easier to control. I hate it when the taco shells break apart first bite. The food and service is as good in Chattanooga as it was yesterday in Nashville.

Chattanooga, the fourth-largest city in Tennessee, is famous for a few things, including the mountain peak that commands everything else – Lookout Mountain, from which you can see five states and up to one hundred miles away on a good day – a fairly pivotal Civil War battle, and the incline railway that makes the mile-long journey to the top of Lookout Mountain: it’s the steepest of it’s kind anywhere in the world.

Sadly, this city has been in the news for the worst kind of reason of late, after a gunman walked into a downtown recruiting station and opened fire, killing a number of United States armed forces personnel. The ‘Chattanooga Strong’ phrase was born from that terrible event, and there will be a big benefit concert here in September, featuring one of my favourites, Brantley Gilbert.

Did some shopping in the afternoon, and began to sort through the massive amount of photos I’ve taken so far, and get them into a serviceable order. We had dinner tonight at Applebee’s, which is a guilty pleasure of mine, and got to witness an amazing sunset, with a mixture of orange sunlight, wispy white cloud clinging to the walls of the mountains that ring Chattanooga and thunder clouds in the distance. It was pretty amazing!