Back in January of 2020, hubby and I took a trip to eastern Tennessee. We’ve been wanting to buy some land where we can escape the heat of the Florida summers, see the leaves change colors and snow so we packed the truck up and drove 9 hours north to visit the area to see if this may be the place for us.

The drive up there was uneventful except for some traffic getting through Atlanta. Our plan was to stay in Cleveland on Friday and Saturday night, then trek our way south to Chattanooga to visit the aquarium and check out the city.

We arrived at the Hampton Inn Cleveland around 6pm, just in time to get something quick to eat and relax for the rest of the night as the next day would be a lot of driving around.

We woke up around 6am the next day and went over our plans of where we were going to go, grabbed some breakfast and headed out.

Needless to say, we drove around and absolutely fell in LOVE with the area! The Tennessee Aquarium is a MUST SEE!

We saw so many beautiful pieces of land and then went to Tellico Grains Bakery for lunch which was very yummy! We shared a wood-fired pizza with bacon on it and I grabbed a cheesecake brownie to go.

After a long day of driving and checking out the area, we decided to go to a local restaurant in Cleveland by our hotel for dinner where we had awesome rueben sandwiches at Big Tom’s Backyard Grill & Bar.

Sorry, the reuben looked and smelled so good that I forgot to take a picture of all of it before I started to inhale it…the coleslaw too!

We also visited the Hiwassee River which was so beautiful! I could sit there all day and just watch the water and listen to the calming sound of the water running.

 

We also inhaled some history while we were exploring… 

 

 

The next day we packed our stuff up, checked out of our hotel and trekked home. Our whole trip home all we kept talking about how beautiful Eastern Tennessee was and how we could definitely live there one day. Guess we have some planning to do!

-Stac