Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Chattanooga- Day 1

After our plans for a vacation at Fort Walton Beach were thwarted by the oil spill disaster, we decided to stay inland and spend our family vacation in beautiful Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga is actually very kid friendly and only a couple of hours from our house, so it was ideal. Grandpa and Sessy met us there on Friday and we immediately went over to visit the Tennessee Aquarium, which is one of the largest in the world. It is split into 2 buildings: Ocean Journey and River Journey.







This male penguin kept bringing the female rocks for the nest that she's sitting on. Each time he brought her a rock he would put it down and then make a noise at her as if to say "is this enough yet?" and she would just close her eyes and turn her head away, and then he would go get another one and do the same thing over again.


Shark Bait!!





The Ocean Journey had hundreds of different jellyfish and other invertebrates (A.K.A. Boneless Beauties)




Once you get down to the bottom floor, the ceiling is glass and you can watch the fish swim above you.


There are little nooks where you can lay down and watch the fish swim over you. The boys crawled into one with some very nice and patient teenagers.


Some juice and tickle time...



Tennessee River



Touch tanks are always a hit in this family.





The boys were pretty exhausted by the end, but I could have stayed for a lot longer, there was so much to see. We will definitely be back!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Really interesting vacation idea! We're trying to figure out our plans if we can't go to the coast because of the spill. Certainly seems like a great alternative. Wondering about affordability and am going to look at Tripadvisor and Yelp for some ideas about what to do.

Erin McCoy said...

chattanooga looks awesome!