This week I drove the seven hours from St. Louis to Chattanooga to start working on the 2010 Annual Conference with Tammy Seldon and our host Gordon Stalans at the Tennessee Aquarium. Our hostess--Adrienne Terry of the Convention and Visitors Bureau--had a packed agenda for us that started with breakfast at The Blue Plate restaurant, which happens to look out on the Tennessee River and is only a block from the theater.
Before I get started on the particulars of the trip, I want to tell you about how beautiful the setting is. Chattanooga sits on the banks of the Tennessee River and is surrounded by beautiful mountains. The sun was just going down when I was driving in the mountains just outside the city, and I could have kicked myself for not arriving sooner so that I could have better seen the spectacular views. This is a fantastic city for outdoor activities. The Tennessee Parks and Recreation Department wholly embraces it with a program called “Connecting People to the Outdoors” and can help you plan outdoor activities, including rafting, fishing, hang gliding, mountain biking, and a lot more. More on that closer to the conference.
Like the 2009 conference in Indianapolis, everything is within walking distance—the hotel, theater, restaurants, and Aquarium are all within blocks of each other. We walked most of the time we were there, and when it rained (thank you, Hurricane Ida) we were able to take the city’s free electric shuttle from the theater to the door of the hotel.
We’ll likely stay in the Marriott Convention Center hotel where there are the kinds of full meeting services necessary for our group. Barbeque is popular, plentiful, and delicious in Chattanooga, but you’ll also find a British tea room, steak houses, seafood restaurants, and Tex-Mex to name a few. We asked the theater staff to let us know their favorite places to eat, and we’ll pass those suggestions on to you.
Birmingham, Alabama, is a two-hour drive from Chattanooga, and we’ll be traveling to the McWane Science Center for Dome Day. Thank you to Elaine Greene-Yancy and her team for giving us a tour of the theater and working through space and technical needs for the event. Birmingham is another walkable city and home of the largest Veterans parade in the US, which we learned because we were there on Veterans Day. If you are planning to go to Dome Day you’ll want to stay an extra day to take in the city as well as the Science Center. It’s a little early for this detail, but there is a time difference between the two cities. Chattanooga is Eastern time and Birmingham is Central time.
We’ll be providing more information about the cities and travel suggestions in the coming months, and a much bigger team will make a visit in July to really nail down all the details, but for now we’ve given you a taste of the event we are starting to plan.