Chattanooga

Getting to Chattanooga was tiring, mainly because I had to wake up at 4:00am to get to the airport for the flights. Yes, flights — there's no direct connection, so I had to take a flight from Sacramento to Atlanta, followed by a (very short) hop from Atlanta to Chattanooga. Chattanooga's airport is about the size of Port Elizabeth's, I'd guess — reasonably respectable. I was staying in the Holiday Inn, which was one of the "official" conference hotels, although it was a few blocks (about a 10–15 minutes walk) from the Chattanooga convention centre — a very impressive, huge convention/conference facility, which seemed to be quite new.

The Holiday Inn is an interesting hotel, as it is on the site of the original Chattanooga station, and of course, Chattanooga is famous because of the old Glenn Miller song, "Chattanooga Choo-Choo", which arose because of the importance of Chattanooga as the Southern terminal of the original railway down the East coast of the USA. When rail travel died an unfortunate death, in the 1950's and 1960's the station was abandoned until it was bought and converted into a hotel. The hotel reception area is in the very grand station building (the main photo above), with two restaurants and several guest rooms in converted railway carriages. There are also a couple of blocks of newer, standard hotel rooms, which I had booked to stay in (the room rate for the railway carriages was considerably more than that for the standard rooms). Well, on my first night the roof of my room started to leak, and the only other rooms available were a smoking room (not an option, thankfully) and a railway carriage room, which they kindly let me stay in for the standard rate! The accompanying photos show the outside and the inside views of the room (excuse the mess!) — it was rather fun!

Needless to say, much of the town and the hotel traded heavily on the Choo-Choo theme, and there was an excellent, HUGE model train display at the hotel. This photo shows only a very small part of it.

While the down-town area of Chattanooga is rather run-down with many derelict old buildings, they are clearly making a huge effort to recreate the town as a venue for tourism and conferences, etc. The conference had a formal dinner/reception on the Thursday evening, which was held in the Tennessee Aquarium, just a few blocks from the convention centre. That is a very impressive, very big aquarium spread over two buildings: one for rivers and for the sea (I did have to wonder just how fresh the sushi was and whether the inhabitants were impressed with seafood being served right in front of their tanks!).