Chicago Weblog

Jack LaLanne

Yesterday I took Grandchild 1 downtown to the big spray park and playground.  We ran around for about two and a half hours, climbing the hills and monkey bars and spinning on that spinning thing which was my favorite piece of playground equipment when I was her age but that I thought lawyers had since rendered extinct.

It had been many, many years since I had climbed around on monkey bars, and boy am I sore today.  Who needs a gym membership when you can just put a set of monkey bars in your backyard?  Although I suppose the neighbors might find you a bit odd.

During the summer, like right now, it doesn’t always rain a whole lot here, and the Ohio river gets low.  This was a problem back in the day when getting around the Midwest meant going up and down the Ohio River.  Due to a series of falls right where the river passes Louisville, boats were often stuck here waiting for favorable water conditions.  Which is how this town came to be in the first place.

At the fossil beds

What it means for us, though, is that the bottom of the river is exposed over on the Indiana side and that rocky bottom is full of millions and millions of fossil remains.  Today we took Grandchild 1 and climbed down there and ran around looking at some of the fossilized horn ferns and shells and other things that covered this part of the world way back when.  Because second graders can get pretty bored by fossil rocks pretty quick, there are also lots of little pools that you can float driftwood in and pretend they are boats.  And you can look at the big bridges and buildings.  It amazes me how normal small children will still act if you can just get them out from behind their video games.

On a fossil rock

On another fossil rock

Yes, it is the Chattanooga Choo Choo.

It was down the road for us today to the home of Rock City and Ruby Falls. Last week on “Kentucky Life” (one of our favorite TV shows), there was a short documentary about those old “SEE ROCK CITY” signs painted on the sides of barns. I remember dozens of them, as well as the “SEE ROCK CITY” birdhouses, while traveling through this part of the country as a small child.  The TV show told us that there were only about twenty such barns left in Kentucky now; we were lucky enough to see one of them on the way down today (it was not far from the wigwam motel).

Our Hotel

We arrived in Chattanooga and checked into our hotel, the “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. Built on the site of the old train station, which closed in 1970, the hotel’s entrepreneurs brought in a bunch of rusty old passenger rail cars, tore out the seats, and converted them into motel rooms.  This allows you to recreate the romance of staying in…a rusty old passenger rail car that’s had all the seats torn out and converted into a motel room. Still, it’s a change from the usual box hotel room, and you do have natural light all along both sides of the car.

We met up with Justin and the grand kids there, spent the rest of the afternoon in the pool, and had dinner at the restaurant where the waitstaff take turns singing seventies tunes up on stage.  Some of the staff are better singers than they are waiters.  After dinner, I took the wife and granddaughters on a horse driven carriage ride around downtown.  The girls seemed more interested in petting the Dalmatian than the ride itself, but later said it was their favorite part of the day.  We wrapped up with a trip to the ice cream shop.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but yes, there are now winter-hardy camellias.

We went to the Master Gardener’s Association Gardenaganza (don’t ask me how to pronounce that) and plant sale at the historic Farmington Plantation in our neighborhood.  There was a wide variety of plants and crafts for sale, but the camellias really caught our eye.  Turns out that winter-hardy camellias were bred about ten years ago, and they’re starting to take off in these parts.  CVH and I were both thrilled to have a chance for a bit of Baton Rouge in our own yard, and got a winter-blooming one for the front of the house.  If this works, our neighbors are going to be so jealous!