The Lost Sea

Yesterday we went to The Lost Sea, which is about half an hour south of us in Sweetwater, TN. The Lost Sea is an underground lake and the tour takes about an hour - perfect for Miss Baby! I thought it would be an hour on the lake but the lake part of it is only about 15 minutes. Our guide, Emily, took us into different parts of the cave and told us a lot about it. She told us that at one point there was a tavern down there, called the Cavern Tavern, where you paid $.05 for all you could drink. But apparently, the farther below sea level you are, the less you feel the alcohol. Sounds good, I suppose, until people started walking back up out of the cave and would suddenly get drunker and drunker and fall down and break their arms and stuff. Good fun, huh? Emily also showed us some of the anthodites (cave flowers) that have grown in the cave and are very rare.

At some point, in an effort to find out where the lake originates, they tagged a bunch of trout and set them loose in the lake. But the trout stayed right where they were - the guide said they're afraid of the dark so they stay where the lights are. The trout grow huge down there because the guides feed them on every tour, but they don't make babies (they need a river for that) so they have to restock the lake every so often.

Eventually, after sending divers down (which didn't work out very well either), they dyed the water red to try to see where the water from the lake goes. They expected to find that other lakes around might end up with pink water, but this didn't happen - people in the area started complaining that their well water had turned red, though. After that, they gave up and aren't completely sure where the lake originates.

It was a good tour and pretty interesting. My two complaints are that the trail wasn't well lit and I often felt like I was going to step on some uneven rock and bite it. My other issue was with the "glass blower." I read that they had a glass blower there and I couldn't wait to see that. I thought he'd actually be blowing glass to make vases and stuff, but he was just using little tubes of glass to make little figurines. Very disappointing. Though overall, it was a great daytrip.

On the way home we stopped at Uncle Bob's BBQ Barn for lunch. Yum!