Sevenoaks

The Time Zones are causing chaos with our sleep patterns. I was awake until 3.00am, then Jackie woke up & stayed awake for the rest of the night. We failed to make breakfast again & it was minutes to 11.00am that we finally struggled out of the motel.

Our 1st port of call was the Passage Waterwalk, also known as the Weeping Stairway on Chattanooga’s Riverfront Parkway. Jackie jumped in for a photo. We also skirted round the Bluff View Art District?

It was a another transition day today & we didn’t want to do too much, so I planned a visit to Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park that spans the States of both Georgia & Tennessee. It is possibly not that familiar to most people including myself, but Chickamauga Battlefield was the potentially the Death Knell of the Confederacy.

President Abraham Lincoln believed that taking Confederate controlled Chattanooga was vitality important, because it would cripple the supply lines of the Confederates. Chattanooga lay on the banks of the Tennessee River, where it cut through the Appalachian Mountains, allowing four major railroads to converge. In the summer of 1863, Union soldiers took control of Chattanooga, but the Confederates weren’t giving up without a fight, resulting in an almighty battle at Chickamauga. Little went to plan (nothing’s changed since!) & thousands of men lost their lives. It was in November 1863 that the City’s fate was finally decided & perhaps that of the Confederacy.

We went to the Visitors Center & I obtained a National Parks Map to add to my collection. The park included a self drive tour through the Battlefield which would take an hour, ideal. Jackie declared that she wasn’t that interested, so we agreed that she would drive & I could get out to look & read the available information.

This is where it all went wrong! Jackie drove out of the car park totally ignoring the Stop 🛑 sign. We had only gone about a 100 metres down the road, when our car was precariously close to a deep drop in the verge, that had ‘wheel wrecker’ written all over it.

I calmly shouted at Jackie “Get over” & she did, but to the other carriageway & towards the oncoming traffic. I, not so calmly, shouted “Get back” & we swerved back again. That was it, apparently Jackie had been nowhere near the verge & everything was all my fault. A short distance later we clunked down into the verge & our damaged bumper let it’s undercarriage drop.

At our next stop, we managed to push the prolapsed undercarriage back up & after lots of shouting at each other, we continued our Battlefield tour in silence. I’m not sure who endured the severest of hostilities, the Confederates or us!

Despite all this, the Battlefield was a fascinating place, full of memorials, information plaques & hundreds & hundreds of cannons to honour the dead & the event. The wooded Battlefield had been preserved as a memorial since the end of the 1800s, which made it easy to visualise the events that we read about.

At the conclusion of the tour, we swapped drivers & I drove through Fort Oglethorpe & picked up Interstate 75. The plan was to get to Knoxville some 120 miles away, but a few miles short, we stopped at Cedar Bluff.

We checked into a decent looking Baymont Inn & Suites & by 4.00pm we were out by the pool enjoying the sunshine. We managed to sneak a few cold beers out in a laundry bag of ice & put some of my freshly washed boxers on the sun bed to dry. Nothing ‘pikey’ in that!

That evening we treated ourselves to a ribeye steak & salad at an ‘Outback Streakhouse’. We both ordered the ribeye steak, baked potato & salad with a large Stella beer. It was nice, but both our steaks were over salty. We have noticed that a lot of the fast food we have been eating recently has been saltier than suits our taste buds.

We were in bed before 9.00pm, hopefully getting a good night sleep before heading on to Pigeon Forge early tomorrow for another bucket list entry to be ticked off.

Song of the Day - Love is a Battlefield by Pat Benatar.Read more