Travels with Serge and Jeanne: Chattanooga

Joan and I spent two and a half weeks on the road this April/May, most of the time in the company of Serge and Jeanne Brasset, French citizens making their first visit to the United States. The trip deserves several posts.

First, the backstory. Joan spent her junior year of college abroad, in Nantes, France, where she lived with a French family, and not in a dormitory of foreign students. Another boarder in Mme Lélan's house was Serge Brasset, and although Serge left at the end of the term to perform his military service, he and Joan have kept in touch over the years. We visited Serge and his wife, Jeanne, briefly in 1980, and, along with Joan's mother, spent a day with Serge, Jeanne, and their daughter Alexandra in 1990. Now Serge and Jeanne have both retired, and their itinerary in the United States was 1) visit Kathy Calhoun, who had lived in Nantes the year before Joan, and 2) visit us. Kathy made the wonderful suggestion that Serge and Jeanne should, instead of flying from Gainesville, Florida to Columbus, Ohio, be driven to Chattanooga where we would meet them and "exchange custody."

Kathy and her husband Tom hosted Serge and Jeanne for a week while the travelers recovered from jet lag. The timing was impeccable, as they arrived two days before the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, closed much of European airspace.

Here Serge is given a turn at the grill. (Thanks for letting me use these pictures, Serge and Jeanne!)

Jeanne got her turn as well.

Here are Tom, Kathy, Serge, and Jeanne at a Florida restaurant.

Tom and Kathy introduced our French friends to alligators, energy-efficient appliance shopping, and who knows what else.

They then brought Serge and Jeanne up to our Chattanooga rendezvous ...

where we met and had dinner.

The next morning, after saying our goodbyes to Kathy and Tom, the four of us set off to see Rock City. We left the congested Interstate 24 and were approaching the base of Lookout Mountain when an ominous ting! announced a glowing tire pressure warning. I pulled into the parking lot of a Rite Aid to inspect ... and found a chunk of metal in the tread of one tire, and a steady hissing.

Within a couple of minutes, as I called Budget Rent-A-Car's roadside assistance number, it was flat.

After navigating the initial menus ("Press one for an Avis car, press two for a Budget car"), I was chatting with an operator, whose first request was to see if there was a spare. Huh? Serge and I both looked, but there was no spare! This meant that a tow truck, rather than a tire-changing assist, was called for. Now it started getting strange; the operator could not locate either of the cross streets north or south of our position in his computer. Until the computer was happy, he couldn't initiate a tow truck. Finally, I walked into the Rite Aid and got their precise street address, and that was sufficient. It seems quite odd because we certainly were not in the boonies!

One ironic aspect of our location was that we were next to the International Towing and Recovery Museum.

The tow truck came much earlier than the promised 2 hours, a welcome development.

The driver/operator, Cecil, was sympathetic. "They'll make you wait out here while they send another car," he volunteered, "and that's not right. You can ride with me to Budget, if you want." We said yes! and he phoned in that he'd be bringing us back. I don't know how much time was saved, but it could have been another hour. We climbed up into the truck's cab and retraced our path along congested I-24.

At the Budget facility, the staff were friendly and eager to minimize our disruption. Signing the accident report ("tire went flat") took about 30 seconds, and the new car was already prepped. We came out ahead in the exchange, in fact: the Chrysler 300M that we were driving, while it had plenty of luggage space for 4 persons, had tiny windows. I kept trying to flip up the sun visor to unblock my view, but it was already up. The passengers had even narrower windows, so we all felt as if we were riding in an armored vehicle. The 300M is a car you buy to inflate your testosterone level. The new car -- a Mercury Grand Marquis -- made a huge difference. Normally I'd call it a "grandpa car," but it was perfect for the next week of touring.

We'd intended to make the 11:00 raptor show at Rock City, and we made the 1:00 show after again negotiating the congested I-24.

The show was great, with hawks, owls, eagles, and vultures.

The tiny screech owls are be simultaneously cute and fierce (and can be stroked).

The barn owl was also striking in his bright speckled plumage.

The black vulture was the easiest predator to train. (Will work for food.)

The birds in the show are all unreleasable either because they were raised by humans, or because of injury. Their bald eagle was missing a wing because he'd been shot (not a good commentary on the human race). Here Serge and Jeanne pose with him.

Then we were off to see Rock City. Here's the viewpoint where you can, on a good day, see seven states. Or so they say, I'm skeptical of Kentucky and Virginia.

Rock City is full of paths that loop and pass over each other, with viewpoints, flowers, a deer park, a climbing wall, and kitschy but authentically vintage exhibits -- the park opened in 1932 -- such as a miniature moonshine still hidden in the crevices.

This point was the beginning of Serge's Law. Joan looked up "kitsch" in the French/English dictionary on her iPod, and discovered it was the same (with a slight difference in pronunciation). We kept encountering other cognates, until Serge proclaimed his law a few days later: "If you don't know what the English word is, try the French word with an English pronunciation, and 80% of the time you'll be right." I insisted on 50%, but over time, with each new twin ("mechanism", for example) I ceded him another 1%, and he won.

After Rock City, we briefly visited Point Park at the tip of Lookout Mountain. We were not going to tramp battlefields on this trip, but the wide view of Chattanooga deserved study, and Serge devoured the park brochure on the battles of Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Lookout Mountain.

Another linguistic excursion: idioms. Serge and Jeanne had gone through my blog before arriving, to brush up on English, and some of the idioms I used had led them to a wrong meaning. Above, I speak of Serge devouring the brochure: I do not mean that he ate it, but rather that he studied every bit of it.

We rested briefly at the hotel and then headed down to the Bluffview Art District for dinner at the Back Inn Café. This required traversing I-24 over Missionary Ridge twice, and the inbound leg was sluggish. There was a pulled-over traffic accident, road construction near the exit ramp, and a minor-league baseball game between us and Bluffview. We were glad to have allowed extra time to stroll around. But, yikes, it was still heavy traffic at Bluffview. The traffic gods smiled on us, perhaps to compensate for the flat tire, and we got the last parking spot within several blocks of the restaurant. I will proudly say that I parallel parked that Mercury Grand Marquis with only one front-and-back to tune the job. Our stroll took us to the nearby Hunter Museum of American Art, and the light dawned. So that was why it was so darned busy tonight ...

It was a major prom night (a Friday night in late April), and the mansion was where everybody gathered for photographs before the dance. We explained the concept of the American prom to Jeanne and Serge ... a spring dance held by every high school (the four years before university), fancier and much more expensive than in our time (the late 1960s).

We moseyed over to the Back Inn Café and had a great dinner.

Then, one last time, we drove over I-24 to our hotel and concluded a very busy day.