Welcome to Chattanooga, now give me all your valuables!

Our visit with the Gardners was the midway point on the road to Chattanooga. In Atlanta, we also made a stop by the temple. Nathanael had been begging for months (or atleast weeks) to go see the temple, so since we were passing by we obliged him. Unfortunately, the closest we could get was to stand and look from across the street.
Then we were on our way to our hotel. We stayed at a Marriot in downtown Chattanooga. The hotel was comfy, though not completely family-friendly. We stayed on the 14th floor, which was nice because we had a view of the mountains and the boys enjoyed riding the elevator, or gator as Nathanael called it.
Chattanooga's downtown has a fabulous amenity- the electric shuttle to take you wherever you need to go. Unfortunately the downtown also has a good share of sketchy individuals. Shortly after we arrived at the hotel, we needed to catch the shuttle to get to our first activity, an evening cruise on a riverboat. As we walked out of the hotel and were walking to the shuttle stop, Paul noticed an individual who was following, sneakily, behind us. He told me to wait a minute and stepped back closer to the hotel doors. As we did, he came creeping around the corner and then started acting really suspicious. We decided to go back inside through a set of doors on the side of the building and the creepy guy came quickly up behind us, right inside with us. It all made me very nervous, and I feel fairly certain that if we hadn't gone back inside those doors, and ended up directly in the hotel lobby, he would have done something.
We were eventually able to safely make it to the dock and board our cruise. It was a 2 hour sunset cruise. It was quite nice in that we had the boat largely to ourselves. Vacationing the week before school starts proved to be a wise choice; we didn't encounter large crowds anywhere we went. The boat was rather slow, the sun was rather hot, and the sun never did set during our time aboard the ship, but it was still nice to do something different.



After a ride back to the hotel aboard the shuttle, we were off to bed on our first night in Chattanooga.