Road Trip Day 7: Chattanooga – The Overhyped “Hidden Gem” 🏞️💸

On Day 6 of our road trip, we originally planned to drive 4 hours from Atlanta to Pigeon Forge in Tennessee…but we were exhausted! So we decided to break up the drive and stop halfway in Chattanooga 🛑. We called to reschedule our next three hotel nights and ended up with two relaxed 2.5-hour drives instead. Compared to Pigeon Forge, hotels here are pricier. To avoid downtown parking fees, I chose a hotel on Lookout Mountain 🏔️—decent views, but the roads here are crazy narrow and winding! We nicknamed it “Southern Ithaca” 😂. Our hotel was near a Walmart, where I even did a drive-through COVID test—free and efficient! No long lines like CVS or public testing sites. The pharmacist guided me remotely while I swabbed my own nose…a bit chaotic but worked! 🧪 Chattanooga’s main attractions: Rock City 🪨 Incline Railway 🚞 Ruby Falls 💧 All are natural sites with heavy commercial packaging: wooden bridges, artificial waterfalls, a “world’s steepest” train, etc. The marketing is intense: “One of America’s 101 Must-See Places” “View 7 States at Once!” “America’s Most Surprising Mile” “Waterfall Named After His Wife After a 17-Hour Cave Expedition” I only had half a day, so I visited Rock City ($18, with a $1 hotel discount 💵) and the Incline Railway ($15). Rock City felt like Watkins Glen (NY) but paid—Watkins Glen only charges $9 for parking! The Incline Railway claims a 73° slope but doesn’t beat the views from Norway’s Bergen Railway or Hong Kong’s Peak Tram 🚠. We met up with a fellow road-tripper (a junior from college) here. He insisted: “This feels so un-American!” “Probably has Chinese investors!” “That waterfall is definitely man-made!” (He was right about that 😂) He hated it, but we thought: Isn’t this just classic U.S. tourism? 🎪 From patriotic education sites (like Williamsburg’s historic colonies 🏛️) to warships in Norfolk/Charleston 🚢, many U.S. attractions are overpriced with no student discounts. Meanwhile, in China, even often offer affordable or free public parks and patriotic sites—especially in Guangzhou! 🇨🇳 #RoadTrip 🚗#Chattanooga 📍#TravelTruths 😅#OverratedAttractions 🎭#USvsChina 🌍#TourismMarketing 🎪#BudgetTravel 💸