Chattanooga to Knoxville

This part of our trip has been gorgeous! I expected hills and mountains, changing leaves, ducks and herons and cooler weather. It has been even better than I had hoped. Although we have seen few towns along the water, there have been homes and farms.

Between Chattanooga and Knoxville we have gone through three more locks - very tall locks. We are now around 800 ft above sea level! Just like the other locks on the US rivers, these serve commercial traffic and have to give them priority. We waited and hour and a half at one lock, and three hours at another, before we could go in. That's OK though. We have actually been pretty lucky overall; at many locks we have gone straight in. The locks on the Tennessee River have been anywhere from 25 to 50 ft tall. I got some good photos of one of these locks to give you a sense of scale. When they let the water in to take you to the next level, it bubbles up from the bottom. It looks pretty cool!


We have had some rain along this leg of the journey, which means we travel inside - a nice change of pace. Today, we are staying put because of high winds. We should have really good weather tomorrow to go the last couple of hours into Knoxville. This marina is near Lenoir City, TN, and has a courtesy car they will let us borrow. We will go in and do some shopping and errands, and be ready to sightsee when we get to Knoxville.

Debris floating by the dock at Chattanooga.

A view of the aquarium from the river.

This is a former railroad bridge, turned pedestrian bridge in Chattanooga.

Lookout Mountain

An interesting boat we saw along the way...

This is one of two nuclear power plants we saw along the Tennessee.

Big, gorgeous house and the sea wall collapsed.

These ducks were all swimming in one area - guess we scared them.

Waiting on the barge before we lock through.

Yay! We get to go in!

This is a really big chamber

And a really big door!

This boat locked through with us. Notice the girl on the back still fishing.

The water boils up from the bottom to fill the chamber

Coming out on the other side

Some kind citizen marked a hazard for us.

Another rainy morning

Driving inside

See the "T" for Tennessee?

The owner also has an orange and white checkerboard dockhouse. Big fan.

Sorry for the reflection. I took it from inside.