27 October 2008
Posted in Post with Pictures on 10/27/2008 04:48 pm by john27 October 2008
Dear Family,
Today I have a cold and so am staying home from work. I don’t feel too terrible but I thought that I shouldn’t infect others. This letter is the first installment concerning the trip that we took to the Southeast USA. It was a great trip. I really enjoyed it, beautiful country, good people, fun things to do, good food.
Sandy and I left here on Friday October 3 early in the morning and flew to Nashville. We met John and Dee Bianouci about 4PM. We got our rental car and drove to our hotel which was near the Grand Ole Opry. We went on a tour of the Grand Ole Opry which wasn’t worth the cost then went to the show in the evening. The Grand Ole Opry is really a radio program with a live audience. The worst part of it was that they often stopped and had commercials, too many commercials.
The next morning we visited the Heritage, which was the home of Andrew Jackson. It is a beautiful large cotton plantation. It was really interesting and one of my favorite places we visited. The flower in the picture is a cotton blossom.
We spent the morning there and then went into Nashville city center for lunch. This was our first taste of good southern barbeque. We ate at the Wild Horse Saloon. They marked the restrooms with large horse statues.
Good food, fun place to eat. 
After Nashville we drove to Chattanooga, about a 2 hour drive. We were planning to stay only one day in Chattanooga but we stayed two. Chattanooga and nearby Chickamauga was the site of one of the most important Civil War battles. It went back and forth but the Union finally drove the Confederates out of Chattanooga, which opened the way for Sherman to make his destructive march to the sea.
There is a large hill west of town that was the site of one of the battles. We took a ride on the inclined railroad to the top. It is supposed to be the steepest passenger railroad in the world. It is basically a cable car on rails. At the top we saw some information on the battle and hiked around a bit on the mountain trails. I am including a picture of Nashville that I took from the top of the hill.
The best part of the day was that we found a little dumpy barbeque place at the bottom of the hill. I’ve been told that Tennessee has the best barbeque so I asked the guy at Sugar’s Barbeque if that was true and he confirmed it. I think it was the best we had. There were 4-5 different barbeque sauces in squirt bottles on the table. I liked to mix clear&hot sauce with molasses sauce. After lunch we went to Ruby falls. Ruby falls is in a cave at the base of the hill, on the northwest side. We walked through a narrow straight cave for a long ways. All along we saw stalactites and stalagmites. Then at the end the cave opens up into a large room, maybe 150 feet high and at the end of the room there is a water fall, it falls 140 feet into a pool. They have different colored lights on the water fall so that the drops sparkle in the dark cave. It is quite a sight.
Chattanooga has a lot of things to do and see. I think that we could have stayed there a couple more days.
The next morning we went to Chickamauga battle field. This was one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, second only to Gettysburg. There were 24,400 killed or wounded in two days of battle. The Confederates won but suffered 26% casualties. The Union had 20% casualties. Four victories like that and there would be no Confederate army left. The battle field is really well preserved. Several years after the war, veterans of the units that fought erected monuments all over the battle field where they fought. It is a nice grassy park now, interspersed with groves of trees. It was hard to imagine that there were 124.500 solders fighting.
Well that is all for this week. Next wee we got to Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston.
Love,
John
