Chattanooga, TN: More Than Just A Choo-Choo

Chattanooga. The Noog. Nooga. The Scenic City. Not matter what you call it, this cute town on the Tennessee River offers a unique combo of city life and outdoor adventures. Chattanooga is so much more than just its famous choo-choo! We gave it two thumbs up during a weeklong stay!

Just this past April, Chattanooga received the rare “National Park City” designation, the one and only so far in alllll of North America. “In a remarkable story Chattanooga has been transformed over the past decades, from one of the most polluted cities in the United States in the 1970s to an unrivalled outdoor destination and biodiversity hotspot.” Read more about this HUGE honor here!

Are you already humming “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in your head? Blame the famous Glenn Miller Orchestra big band song, which was the first song ever to become certified as a gold record (not to mention a terrible 80’s film starring a leering Joe Namath dressed in purple, but I digress).

You leave the Pennsylvania station ’bout a quarter to 4
Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner, nothin’ could be finer
(Then to have your ham and eggs in Carolina)
When you hear the whistle blowin’ eight to the bar
Then you know that Tennessee is not very far
Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rollin’
(Whoo, whoo, Chattanooga, there you are!)

The Chattanooga Choo Choo was one of three trains operating from NYC to Chattanooga, a major railroad hub at the time. Its signature Choo Choo train station recently received a $20 million face lift, complete with a variety of restaurants and nightlife. The entire downtown area is bustling, including attractions like Songbirds, a world-class guitar museum.

Besides the centrally located train lines, Nooga also benefitted from its strategic location on the Tennessee River, which led it become the location of multiple Civil War battles, as frequently happened in all the best U.S. locales.

Perched on the top of Lookout Mountain, the tidy Point Park at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park commemorates a series of 1863 skirmishes, when Union and Confederate forces fought for control of Chattanooga, known as the “Gateway to the Deep South.” 

Lookout Mountain is the location for many other popular tourist activities, including a swinging bridge, underground waterfall & cave tour, and incline railway — the steepest passenger railway in the world! During our visit in 2025, the incline was still closed due to track damage from a recent forest fire, but it should be opening again soon.

Also on Lookout Mountain is the famous See Rock City, the well-known gardens with multiple acres of rock formations.

If you’ve traveled around the U.S. at all, you’ve likely seen “See Rock City” emblazoned on the sides and roofs of barns and buildings. This started as an wildly ingenious marketing scheme back in the ’30s, when the owners were trying to figure out how to get people to go out of their way to come to see all their pretty rocks.

They hired a sign painter to travel around and offer to paint people’s barns for free, so long as he could include those three simple words as part of the design. At one point there were over 900 barns painted “See Rock City,” though now only about 42 remain, not counting the on-site birdhouses and cute little library.

It’s hard to comprehend (or explain) exactly what Rock City is all about, but it’s basically a long, one-way loop trail through a rocky garden, with all kinds of natural and man-made features, including lots of cool and colorful artwork, for over half a million visitors every year.

From the top, you can “see seven states,” which all look basically like the same continuous green field to me, but hey — you can say you did it. Also in this area of the gardens, an impressive 100-foot waterfall.

The lookout point is Lovers Leap, where the Indian version of Romeo and Juliet reportedly occurred. Here, so they say, a Chickasaw warrior named Sautee was tossed to his death after falling in love with a Cherokee maiden named Nacoochee, despite their tribes being mortal enemies. She quickly followed, leaping to her death and into the legend of Lover’s Leap.

Many people come here for the nostalgic whimsy of it all (and because barn roofs have been commanding them to do so for years), and many people bring their kids, especially for the underground portion called Fairyland Caverns, where well-known fairy tales have been ornately styled and elaborately lit in little tableaus, using untold gallons of glow-in-the-dark paint.

Lookout Mountain also has a popular cave tour called Ruby Falls, but we’ve visited many spectactular caverns (including New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns and Montana’s Lewis and Clark Caverns) so our standards are pretty high. We instead pivoted to Raccoon Mountain Caverns, which was also the location of our RV campground for the week.

Raccoon Mountain Caverns has two tours: the 45-minute “Crystal Cavern Tour,” and the 2-hour “Wild Cave Tour.” Can you tell by these pictures which one we picked? Oh, yah baby, we were feelin’ WILD!

Yep, the Wild Cave Tour was exactly that. We found ourselves crouching, crawling, slithering, sliding, log-rolling, and squeezing through the lesser-explored parts of the cave, all by the light of our headlamps only.

They warned us we’d get “a little dirty” and to wear old clothes that covered all parts of our body. They then added helmets, gloves, knee pads and elbow pads to the get-up, and we knew we were in trouble. Here is the before.

“Dirty” didn’t exactly describe the after. We were filthy from head to toe, sopping wet and covered in mud. Nonetheless, it was one of the most fun, albeit challenging, things we have ever done! Shout-out to my 71-year-old husband, who despite have two knee replacements, two hip replacements, and three major back surgeries, is still out there killin’ it with his willingness to say YES LET’S GO!

Back aboveground and downtown, we explored the Riverwalk, a long paved pathway with a bronze fish marker every half mile. The vintage steamship Southern Belle cruises up and down the river, and duckboat and trolley tours share the history and gems of The Noog with visitors. The building with the epic peaked glass roofs is a world-class aquarium.

A series of bridges cross the river to the charming Northshore, and the iconic 2,375′ long Walnut Street Bridge is designated solely for pedestrians. It is currently undergoing renovation, but walking over the river is a fun way to experience the Northshore’s Coolidge Park, historic carousel, and small shops (including handcrafted ice cream at Clumpies, where seasonal flavors might include blueberry lookout lavender). Feeling playful? Make your mark in Chalk Alley, or learn the Cha-Cha or the Rumba using the embedded, numbered bronze footsteps in the sidewalk.

Nooga is becoming a Southern restaurant hotspot. We set our sights on Champy’s, a divey hole in the wall with the BEST fried chicken, potato salad, and chicken salad we’ve ever had (we even returned and took more to-go). The insides are covered with signed dollar bills and we added a tribute to our grandkids. Friends also recommended Uncle Larry’s for fried catfish, proclaimed to be “fish so good it will smack you” (sounds violent) but it was closed every time we tried to go. Next time!

The Scenic City is also a place full of art. We started at the free Sculpture Fields at Montague Park, with more than 50 large-scale sculptures along a winding trail. They also had a neat feature where you could use the free OtoCast app to hear from each of the artists as you stand gazing at their masterpiece, thinking “what the heck.”

One of the sculptures was an old orange truck, the bed filled with rusted car parts. It reminded us immediately of the old orange truck filled with Disney-esque luggage at our last stop in Alabama, Unclaimed Baggage! Distant cousins, perhaps?

Even more art can be found in the Bluff View Arts District neighborhood, perched on a cliff with some of the best views in town. Also here, the Hunter Museum of American Art was a fabulous find. Funded by the heir to the Coca-Cola Bottling fortune, it is both the modern building on the left, and the repurposed mansion on the right, connected by an indoor corridor.

Both inside and out, the Hunter had wonderful works of art, in bite-sized quantities, uncrowded and unrushed and beautifully displayed. Here are two of my favorites, but the Hunter has something for everyone!

Later, we returned twice to Lookout Mountain, but this time on the Georgia side. Did I mention the Tennessee/Georgia state line runs right through the middle of Lookout Mountain? A mere 25 minutes from Chattanooga, Cloudland Canyon State Park straddles a 1,000-foot gorge on the western edge of Lookout.

Our first visit included the easy 1-mile Overlook Trail with picturesque views into the canyon, and the surprise of stumbling across a bride in the middle of the forest, waiting for her groom to arrive for the magic moment. (Front view: 8.5 months pregnant, but still beautiful.)

Then, the strenuous 2-mile Waterfalls Trail, involving a steep hike down more than 600 stairsteps one way, with the reward of the rushing Cherokee Falls and Hemlock Falls at the bottom.

Our second visit was for the moderate 5-mile West Rim Loop Trail, rated as one of the top ten hikes in the U.S. by Backpacker Magazine. It includes numerous overlooks into the canyon, but on this particular day also included thick fog that obscured all views. Oh well, can’t win them all!

That’s right …. Chattanooga …. it’s waaay more than just a Choo Choo, and we will definitely be back!

FALL CREEK FALLS STATE PARK

75 miles north of Chattanooga is the most astonishing, “they have literally everything” state park we have yet visited in 12 years of RV adventures around the country. Fall Creek Falls State Park, despite being pretty much in the middle of nowhere, was pristine, well managed and beautiful.

This park, Tennessee’s largest and most-visited, has endless activities: a lake for kayaking, boat tours, waterfalls, hiking trails galore, classes, pool, restaurant, nature center, an 18-hole golf course, ziplines, paved bike paths, and on and on … including this sweet swimming hole.

The park has not one, not two, but SIX waterfalls, including the 256-foot Fall Creek Falls. Viewable from the top, it’s really something — but to feeeeel the water’s fury, take the steep 1/2-mile trail to the base! Just don’t expect to be alone down there!

Other hiking, like the Paw Paw Loop, leads to dramatic overlooks and rocks perched on the edge of the gorge. There are also two fun swinging bridges across the river — and everything here is dog-friendly!

We kayaked the lake, where the glassy water reflected the surrounding trees like some kind of nature Rorschach ink blot test.

We also took a “guided boat tour” which consisted of the young ranger uttering three sentences total in one hour: (1) this is the dam that forms the lake, (2) that is the lodge, and (3) that is Goose Island. Oh well, it was a cheap boat ride anyway.

Our full hookup campground (loop C) was a delight, but if you are lacking an RV, the sweet cabins right over the water would be pretty awesome, too! Fishing from your porch, anyone?

In short, Fall Creek Falls was everything a state park SHOULD be, and a must-visit stop in Eastern Tennessee!

LENOIR CITY, TN

Our final Tennessee adventure involved catching up with former neighbors and long-time friends, Diane and Cherlyn, who live west of Knoxville near Lenoir City, in a cool community called Tellico Village. They had us to their home for lasagna, and Southern banana bread pudding with homemade ice cream. Their dog is named Winnie, so it was Finnie and Winnie Night!

Here, we RV camped at beautiful location, Yarberry Campground, where many of the sites manage to be both wooded and waterside, with a swimming beach and beautiful sunsets each night.

The last day, we rented a pontoon boat from the campground and cruised the shores of enormous Tellico Lake. At 33 miles long, it’s huge, so though you can kayak here, we didn’t think we’d get very far with our puny biceps.

The lake was created when Tennessee Valley Authority bought a huge swath of farmland and flooded it to create the lake. They didn’t bother to remove the grain silos, so it’s a little startling to motorboat by the tippy tops of farm equipment in the middle of a lake. They must have also removed all the cow poop at the time, because it is reported to be one of the cleanest lakes in East Tennessee.

Tellico Lake’s 357 miles of shoreline are rimmed with multi-million $$ mansions (many 3rd, or 4th, or 12th homes for their owners). We soothed ourselves by reminding each other that it would be a lot of work to clean a 18,000 square-foot mansion. And so far, we’ve stayed pretty happy in our 200-square-foot RV!

We are leaving Tennessee, but not without a newfound appreciation for this beautiful state! We’ll be back, for sure!