At the end of May, we packed up the SUV and headed to Chattanooga for three nights in a rented cabin for our first family road trip. Though I’ll share with you how we did that tomorrow, today I’m recapping our trip.
Though I’ve lived in Georgia my whole life, I’ve never ventured out to explore Tennessee and thought this would be the perfect opportunity. Chattanooga is about 2 hours from Atlanta and includes so many wonderful things. We definitely will be going back when we have older kids as we discovered there was a lot we couldn’t really do having such a young kid (Katherine was 5.5 months at the time). So, we committed ourselves to things we wouldn’t want to do again on return trips with older kids: Ruby Falls and the Tennessee Aquarium.
How We Chose Our Itinerary
We decided what we wanted was a close trip where we could do a little bit of activities but also kick back and relax. We found a cabin on VRBO that equipped us with a kitchen, cable TV, and a hot tub.
Next, we broke down the trip into what we wanted to do as two adults. Because with an infant, she really just does what we want to do and if you wear them in a carrier they fall asleep during 75% of your activities. In fact, if it wasn’t for the drive distance from Chattanooga, we almost visited the Jack Daniels Distillery.
Chattanooga truly has so many great family-friendly options so to make it easy we decided we would visit things that we wouldn’t want to do with older kids. The reason we wouldn’t do Ruby Falls with older kids is because it is about a 2 hour claustrophobic trek to visit a waterfall inside of a cavern that sits about an Empire State building depth underground. And the pictures do it plenty of justice.
The reason we wouldn’t do the Tennessee Aquarium is because we have the Georgia Aquarium closer and I want them to rep our own aquarium and secondly because (sorry, Tennessee) our aquarium is so very much better (we have dolphins AND whales).
The Highlights
We highly recommend touring some of the highly rated restaurants and walking around downtown. Our favorite place to eat was Maple Street Biscuit Company (which does have locations elsewhere in the South) and Milk & Honey for coffee and gelato.
At the end of the day, retiring in a vacation home versus a hotel room. We discovered our new favorite beer blend: a snake bite using Angry Orchard and Peroni introducing to you ladies and gentleman what we adoringly refer to as an Angry Pony (you’re welcome). And we definitely took a few dips in the hot tub after we put la babe to sleep.
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