Chattanooga and Cloudland Canyon State Park

Being concerned with having a campsite for the July 4th holiday weekend, we made reservations for a site at Best Holiday Trav-L-Park just south of Chattanooga for Friday, July 1 and Saturday, July 2.  Regretfully we left our campsite at DeSoto State Park.  We would have loved to stay there for many more days, but we needed to move north.  It was a relatively short drive, so we arrived early afternoon. 

Cloudland Canyon State Park in northwest Georgia lies just a few miles south, so we visited it in the afternoon.  Cloudland is a small park that lies on the western edge of Lookout Mountain that straddles a gorge cut into the mountain by a creek.  It has spectacular views into the canyon from an easily accessible east rim trail.

Look out below!

We drove around some of the roads in the park, eventually parking at the highest point, which featured a large radio antenna, lookout tower, disc golf course, tennis courts, & a large picnic shelter.  Parking just off the top, we took a nice, shaded 5 mile hike over nearly flat terrain.  Linda was a good sport and hung in there for the complete hike.  Driving back to Chattanooga we happened by a nice country restaurant.  After working hard during the hike, we settled down for a nice dinner.

On Saturday afternoon, we explored downtown Chattanooga.  Years ago we visited the new-then aquarium, so we decided to skip it.  We visited shops on the north and south sides of the river.  We saw some free, electric powered shuttles, so we hopped aboard.  The end of the shuttle line was the Chattanooga Choo-Choo Museum.  We spent some time touring the museum.

As we traveled back downtown on the shuttle, we noticed a bank electronic sign that read 100 degrees.  It was indeed hot and back to the RV park we went.  We cooked out that night after enduring a power outage at the RV park that lasted about 2 hours.  Good thing our RV is self contained.  We fired up the generator and ran the air conditioners until power was restored.  We cooked outside and prepared for a travel day to Nashville on Sunday.