Yesterday, we finished our parks kind of early in the day, but I just needed an evening to relax and watch TV, so blogging never happened. Tonight, I'm tired with a massive headache, so I'll compromise by catching up on the blog, but I'll add pictures later since that's the longest part of blogging. I'll link back to this post once I get the pictures added.
We started off yesterday at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Having recently been to the Kennedy Space Center, I was underwhelmed. Steve enjoyed himself though! The coolest exhibit was the one where you walk through a replica ISS and you get to see how they live while in space. The giant spaceship outside and the Saturn V exhibits were pretty cool too!
We took advantage of the Huntsville brewpubs for lunch, stopping at Yellowhammer and Below the Radar. Of the Huntsville breweries, Yellowhammer and Straight to Ale were our favorites.
After lunch, we went to Russell Cave National Monument. This is a very quick park site to do. We were expecting a cave tour, but it's not that kind of cave. This is preserved more for the archaeological aspect because there were some very early dwellers in this cave. You actually can't even go into the cave, but you can walk five minutes to a viewing platform to see it. We did that and watched the movie and that was about all you can do there. In our research for planning this trip, many people said the cave is underwhelming. I think that's because they were expecting a cave tour like we thought too. But since we went in with low expectations and watched the video at the visitor center, we were actually pretty surprised.
Like I said at the beginning of this blog, our day ended relatively early because Russell Cave doesn't take long at all. So we had dinner and called it a night by watching Drunk History reruns on Comedy Central. :-)
Today was another easy day too. We started off at Little River Canyon National Preserve. There isn't a whole lot of hiking to do here, but we hiked to Little River Falls and Little Falls (yes, they are different). Both are very short trails - Little River Falls is about a quarter-mile, one-way on a boardwalk and Little Falls is maybe a half-mile one-way, if even that. However, it does have 135 steps down to the canyon, all varying sizes. We were happy to get those done in the morning because by the time we were done with the second hike, it was really hot and humid. So we cooled down in the car while doing the 23-mile scenic drive.
We had lunch at Terminal Brewhouse in Chattanooga where the beer and the food were just okay.
That was really all we had planned for the day, but since our hotel didn't allow for check-in until 4:00, we had to kill time somehow in Chattanooga, TN. So we consulted Trip Advisor and found that the Tennessee Aquarium is the #6 thing to do. We were pretty sure we'd be underwhelmed after being at the Georgia Aquarium last weekend, but we were pleasantly surprised. I've never seen so many different kinds of turtles, and if you know me, you know that meant I was in heaven! They also had two Green Sea Turtles and I spent probably a half hour just watching them. The smaller of the two, Oscar, is missing his tail, back flipper, and most of the other back flipper. They suspect this was because a boat hit him. :-( They rescued him and found that his shell is kind of wonky too and that means he has trouble swimming, so they knew they wouldn't be able to release him back in the wild. Since they rescued him, he's already tripled in size. The larger one, Stewie, was found on shore severely malnourished. I don't know how they knew it, but they knew he had been swimming the wrong way and that's probably why he wasn't finding food. So they rehabbed him and released him back, but then a few weeks later, he ended up back on shore again after going the wrong way again. Since he kept swimming the wrong way, they ended up taking him in at the aquarium and now broccoli is his favorite food. :-)
We had dinner at Big River Brewing Company where the beers and the food were fantastic! Way better than our lunch stop!
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