Sunday morning I woke up super early to get in a 30 minute run before coming home to pack up my stuff for the trip. My mom and I headed out at 11am, leaving my brother home to watch the animals. Despite running into some traffic, we managed to arrive at the La Quinta inn in Chattanooga by 2:30pm. We spent a couple hours driving/walking around to get to know the area better before setting off to Collegedale to meet my friend and his mother at the Southern University campus.
Isn't this car crazy?! Found it while exploring.
That evening we had dinner at my friend's family's house. Sadly I forgot to take pictures, which is a shame because they have chickens, goats, some fruit trees, and a beautiful vegetable garden! Dinner was a lot of fun with great food. I brought some Florida Mangoes that I had left over from my last fruit order from Taylor's Tropicals and my friend's mom gave me a bunch of Heirloom Tomatoes from their garden to have with the mango.
Monday morning cam around and it was raining, so I headed downstairs to use the hotel gym. I ran 2.5 miles on the treadmill at 7mph with intermitant 8mph sprints, and 20 minutes on the elliptical on the hardest setting. I can tell you I was assured that I had a good work out with my humming muscles and drenched t-shirt as good indicators.
I arrived back up to my room to get ready for the day and was famished, but my mom was still sleeping, so I had leftover chopped up papaya from yesterdays lunch to tide me over. When we finally did get out, we came across a grocery store called Greenlife, which turns out, is owned by Whole Foods.
We walked in and I immediantly fell in love! They had fresh squeezed fruit and veggie juices, fruit smoothies aka Froozies, chopped up fruit, and lot's of yummy locally grown tomatoes to offer. Throughout our two day stay I consumed three Froozies, a large container of pineapple, a bag of medjool dates, a bunch of bananas, a bag of chopped apples, and loads of tomatoes from their store!
You can bike to work. . . I love it!
This one was my favorite, I had it twice. It's called a Mango Lassi: mango, banana, rosewater, fresh apple juice, cardamom, and coriander.
My mom's Froozie, The Bumble Berry: blueberry, banana, fresh OJ, and local honey.
Monday afternoon rolled around and my mom and I headed back to my friend's house. The plan was to meet there at 6:30 so that my friend and his brother, could take me to a nearby park to play Ultimate Frisbee with a group of their friends (if you don't know what Ultimate Frisbee is just google it to see a game). The game started close to 7:00 (I decided to play barefoot. . .fun!), and we played for two hours through both the heat of the sun and the wet of the rain. The game ended when to many people had to head home for us to make up two teams with enough players for the field.
My Dinner before my first ever Ultimate Frisbee game. Some organic apples and The Earth Shake: strawberry, blueberry, peach, banana, local honey, and fresh apple juice.
This morning, before we were due to head back home, my mom decided to join me in the hotel gym. She went for a two mile walk on the tread mill with some short sprints thrown in occasionally (go Mom!) =D I did the same workout I did Monday morning, but it was harder this time due to some muscle soreness from last night. I'm used to running at a set pace for long distances, however, when you play Ultimate Frisbee, there is a lot of sprinting, twisting, jumping, and zig-zagging. I used parts of my leg muscles I forgot I even had, but no worries, I remembered them this morining. LOL!
We stopped off at Greenlife one more time for Froozies and water before heading out. An hour later though I got hungry and devoured the last of our Tennessee tomato stash, whoops!
I had two packages of these on the way home and. . .
This sucker here + a large Cherokee Purple tomato as soon as we got home.
It's always a wonderful to meet and hang out with people whose idea of fun isn't going to the mall, or the movies, or eating out at a trendy restaurants, instead preferring to go hiking, biking, running, play Ultimate Frisbee, ect. It was so nice for me to be around real and sincere people while enjoying the outdoors. I may have only been away for a couple of days, and most people wouldn't consider what I did on this trip to be anything special, but I saw it as the best vacation I have had EVER!
I hope all of you out there have at least one or two people in your life that you can find that sort of pleasure in their company. The area of Tennessee I stayed in might not be viewed as the most exciting place to be, but it became that for me because of the people that were with me. Just remember, it's not the place your at that makes you happy, it's the people in that place that do.
Best wishes all!
