We've been to see the Chattanooga Farmer's Market and Chili Cookoff, the Chattanooga Aquarium and the 3D I-Max movie "Dolphins & Whales.

The Farmer's Market wasn't much, mostly because harvest season's over here, but there was a good artisan bakery where I got a very nice Kalamata olive bread, and we had 5 little bowls of chili from the 5 finalist Chattanooga fire stations. You got a voting ticket to try all of the chilis and then put your ticket in the ballot box for your favorite. My favorite was Station Number 1 and Kathy liked Station #1 the best too. I haven't watched the national news to see who won.

The Chattanooga Aquarium really was excellent! The aquarium is so close we just walk across the street to get to it. This picture is where we are docked and taken from the Aquarium 4th floor windows. There are really two separate huge buildings. One is the fresh water rivers and the other is the salt water aquarium. Sure enough, going on a Monday is great because the place wasn't packed with crowds, just us a a few other tourists.

The rivers aquarium was totally excellent - worth the trip. There were hundreds of large tanks, great underwater "scene setting", like this croc.,









Besides the many freshwater fish, I also liked the river otters and the live butterfly garden.















The salt water aquarium was equally impressive. It was mostly a single huge tank with many access points and views, full of an incredible variety of salt water fish. This is a shot of the underwater cave diver view where you can walk through an underwater cave and look up and through the cracks to see the deep fish hiding down there, almost like scuba diving.


One exhibit had many tanks of seahorses and I was amazed by this leafy sea dragon seahorse. Everything you see in green is actually just one single seahorse looking like kelp.







The 3D I-Max was a Ho-Hum. Very good pictures of whales and dolphins, but the 3D glasses didn't work that well and were too distracting and there was an awful lot of moralizing about man's bad effect on every creature they showed. Yeah, I know that stuff, but they just laid it on too thick and too often. I'd rather see the movie just as an I-Max movie, and without all the moralizing.

There's a cold snap here and it's going down to 24 degrees tonight. I just ran both diesel engines to get 1,000 lbs of steel hot again to help keep water pipes from freezing in the engine rooms. The boat's nice and warm though with our built-in heaters in the air conditioners.