The Sisters Arrive for Their Visit!

In May, two of Laurie’s sisters came to pay us a visit.  They stayed with us for a busy fun-filled week and I served as both chauffeur and tour guide.  So off we went to pick them up at the airport!

No…this is not the Knoxville Tennessee Airport terminal.  This is the terminal in Chattanooga Tennessee.  For a small airport, this entry foyer is pretty impressive!

There are non-stop flights into Chattanooga from Chicago, Detroit, Newark, Washington D.C., Charlotte, Atlanta, Orlando, Tampa Bay and Dallas.

There is a very comfortable waiting area adjacent to the only concourse leading to the aircraft gates.  A small shop is just to the right of this photo and the dining facility is at the left.

The plane arrived on time from Charlotte North Carolina… Although Bonnie and Karole live in the St. Louis Missouri area, there aren’t any direct flights to either Chattanooga or Knoxville.  The difference is that flying into Chattanooga is usually significantly less expensive than it is to fly into Knoxville.  The St. Louis to Charlotte to Chattanooga flight cost about 1/3 of what it cost the ladies to fly home from Knoxville.

The photo is a little fuzzy…should have used my ‘sports mode’ for motion but here come Karole and Bonnie and they looked happy to see us too! 

From where we live, it’s about 45 minutes to Knoxville’s airport and it’s about 75 minutes to Chattanooga’s airport.  When Dawn Marie comes to visit us, she frequently flies into Chattanooga.  For us, the drive is no big deal…

The sisters had decided that as long as they were flying into Chattanooga, that we should spend the rest of the day there, looking around and checking out an attraction or two.  I wanted to give them a visual perspective of the downtown area so I took them up to the Bluff View Art District to start our tour.

The bluff is home to an historic neighborhood that hosts restaurants, a bakery, a coffee house, an historic bed and breakfast and the Hunter Museum of American Art.  There are many sculptures on public view in the area around the outside of the Museum.  This one is titled “Free Money” by sometimes controversial artist Tom Otterness and it was completed in 2001.  To learn more about this artist, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Otterness.

All three sisters love horses…Karole and Laurie especially so.  It was no surprise when they wanted to pose next to this sculpture entitled “Boreal” that was completed by Deborah Butterfield in 2001.  Butterfield is known for her sculptures of horses made from found objects, like metal, especially from pieces of wood.  To learn more about this artist, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Butterfield.

The views were the primary reason for me to bring the sisters up to Art Bluff.  From the bluff and the museum itself, visitors have a great view of the Tennessee River with its bridges and river traffic, downtown Chattanooga and the bluffs and low mountains around the area.  The old bridge in the foreground has been transformed into a pedestrian walkway across the river.  

FYI…via a series of locks and dams the Tennessee River is navigable for commercial traffic and pleasure craft from where it joins the Ohio River all the way down through Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, touching Mississippi, then flowing through northern Alabama and back up into Chattanooga all the way to Knoxville Tennessee. 

Chattanooga has done a great job of integrating the riverfront into the city scape and it is both a great place to live, with condos and apartments along the river, and a fun area to explore.  Note the winding walkway in the lower center of the photo leading down to the waterfront.  There is also a glass bridge across the roadway that leads to several apartment buildings…

Here is another sculpture outside the art museum.  This one surrounded by roses is titled “D’A-LAL” and it was completed by Harold Cash in 1929.  Cash was born in Chattanooga in 1895 and he died in Georgia in 1977.  He was one of the founders of the Sculptors Guild in New York.  There are scholarships available for students in Georgia and Tennessee in his name.

This is the Hunter Museum of American Art.  The juxtaposition of that magnificent early 20^th century mansion and the ultramodern museum expansion to the left is interesting to say the least.   The museum focuses on American art from the Colonial period to the present day.  The collection includes paintings, works on paper, sculpture, photography, mixed media, furniture and contemporary studio glass covering a range of styles and periods.  However, given the beautiful weather and very comfortable temperatures, the sisters had chosen another Chattanooga based attraction to visit!  More to follow…

Laurie and I will return to the museum on a cloudy or cold day.  The Hunter Museum of American Art is located at 10 Bluff View in Chattanooga Tennessee.  Phone: 423-267-0968.  The museum’s website can be found at: http://www.huntermuseum.org/.

Just one more photo before we moved on to our next Chattanooga based adventure… I took this photo while we were stopped at a light just because I like the look of that old 3-story building.   The Elkins building was built in 1890.  This 6,000 sq. feet building was purchased by a developer in 2015 for $350,000.  They left the exterior as it was and it’s now being used as an office building.

That’s it for now… Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave