We got a call from my cousin that my 95-year-old Great Aunt wasn’t doing very well, so we flew down to visit while we still could. Some of my cousins came by too so we got to see them, too.
We had one good day with her, but the other day she didn’t really know who we were. It hurt to see her like that, she’s been doing so well until just the last few months. She told us that she hoped we wouldn’t live to 95, it was awful.
She was really only awake and alert for part of the afternoon, so we spent the rest of the time touring around Chickamauga, which is a cute little town nearby with a nice central park, and Rock City, which I haven’t been to since I was a little kid.
Rock City is a park with trails winding around a bunch of large rock formations. It’s mostly known for its advertising, which appears on barn roofs for hundreds of miles around with the uninformative slogan “See ROCK CITY”. The rocks are nice, but not really exciting enough for the type of roadside tourism they want to attract, so they’ve spruced it up with a bunch of odd gnome statuary throughout the park. The whole place is unabashedly kitschy and self-aggrandizing, which I think is part of the charm.
