America 2015: Day Twenty-Two (20 August 2015)

Back down south don't ya know?
The girls just got that Tennessee Mojo
Kiss my mouth, let the whiskey flow
Gonna hang my hat when I get back home
The one sweet thing that I miss the most…
Oh, Tennessee Mojo

                                                                                                     - The Cadillac Three

Thursday 20 August

Slept late after a stormy night in Chattanooga, and I got a chance to finish the novel I’m reading about the early battles of the American Civil War. It’s weird being in a place that is mentioned often in the pages of the novel. I’m getting through books like it’s going out of fashion on this trip – so relaxing!

We bought a combination ticket yesterday, giving us discounted access to three of Chattanooga’s biggest tourist attractions, but we didn’t get to the third of them yesterday so on our way out of town today, we drove up to Rock City, which is actually across the Tennessee-Georgia state line.

Lover's Leap

 

How best to describe Rock City? Well, it’s a cross between one of those private gardens that people pay a small entrance fee to wander around and a kid’s attraction. You get both, beautifully landscaped trails that lead out to Lover’s Leap (amongst other large rock formations) passing all sorts of plant life, and wind back through an underground cavern that has been stacked with sculptures that depict various fairy tales. Honestly, at times it felt like I’d walked into Disney’s It’s A Small World ride.

 

Rock City is a really nice place to wonder around. There are miles of trails, a great deer habitat, and, at Lover’s Leap, a very impressive lookout, from which you can see territory belonging to seven different states – Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia and Alabama – and High Falls, a manmade waterfall dropping from Lover’s Leap from one hundred and forty feet up. Whilst there was a fairly low cloud ceiling, the views were still spectacular.

 

After Rock City, we drove north to Knoxville, home of the University of Tennessee and it’s sporting facilities, including the mammoth Neyland Stadium, which hosts UT football and sits more than 100,000 people. Locals love their team, the Volunteers, so much so that you can barely walk twenty meters down the street without seeing someone wearing some item of clothing with a giant orange T emblazoned prominently. As I was reminded watching ESPN tonight, it’s two weeks exactly to the start of the new college football season.

We’re in Knoxville as part of our tour package for the NASCAR race weekend at the nearby Bristol Motor Speedway (about ninety minutes’ drive) and we’ll be spending Friday night and Saturday night at the track. It seems like a long time ago that we put a deposit down on this package for this weekend, and I’m incredibly excited to see the track tomorrow.