Summer of 21 - #4 - Moving Day & a visit to the Lost Sea Adventure, Sweetwater, Tennessee

April 21st, 2021 

We left Lakeside Landing in Alabama, and headed to Bitners RV Park at Spring City, Tennessee.

First we crossed into Georgia.

Ok, Chattanooga or Nashville.  This time we're heading East, through Chattanooga. We have been there before and really enjoyed it but this time we're driving through or should it be Choo-Choo Chattanooga!!!

Into Tennessee.

We followed this truck, maybe that's logs for our new log home!! Nope, he turned off before us.

We arrived at Bitners after 4 hours on the road. It was a strange campground with a lot of "residents".  The office was closed for the day and they had told us to just choose a site and see them in the morning. We drove round, there really were no sites that stood out.  The problem here was the utility hookups were near the front of the sites and we had to make sure our hoses would reach.  Bryan parked as far forward as he could and we were almost on the road.  I drove the car around the campground to see if there were any better sites but there really wasn't so we stayed where we were. 

We got set up ok but could only get very few tv channels and not the ones we usually watch. There was supposed to be cable but we found out you had to go to the cable office to get a box and we really didn't want to do that so we settled for what we had.  We managed through the week, using the weak internet and the few channels that we had. We just had to manage our internet connections.

We had some errands to do and places to visit so we weren't going to be home a lot anyway. 

Here's a map showing our travel route for the day.  Oh, and we're back in the Eastern Time Zone so gained an hour!!

Today's route(We took the shortest route)

Our first task was to get our prescriptions transferred from the base at Jacksonville to Walmart.  There is not a base close by and so we will have to pay for our medicines this time. 

This ended up taking 5 days!!!! We started off well by getting most of our prescriptions within a day but there was one of mine that didn't transfer.  After several phone calls between Walmart, the base and myself. We eventually got it sorted.  It's a good job I'm totally gray now, because if I wasn't I definitely would have had a lot more gray hairs after that. 

The pharmacy people in Walmart were very good and didn't give up but it took all of us combined, to get it resolved over 5 days.

To make it worse, it cost $68 for our pills. It could have been worse I guess. One of them was over $500 before insurance!!

April 23rd, 2021

In the meantime we managed to visit The Lost Sea Adventure. It was a tour through some caves that lead you down to an underground lake where you got on a boat ride inside the cave. We have done a lot of cave tours but the boat ride made this one a little different.

The tunnel into the cave

The following is copied from their website at The Lost Sea Adventure.

"History of the Lost Sea

In Times Past:

Deep inside a mountain near Sweetwater in East Tennessee is a remarkable body of water known as The Lost Sea. Listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as America’s largest underground lake, the Lost Sea is part of an extensive and historic cave system called Craighead Caverns.

The caverns have been known and used since the days of the Cherokee Indians. From the tiny natural opening on the side of the mountain, the cave expands into a series of huge rooms. Nearly a mile from the entrance, in a room now known as “The Council Room,” a wide range of Indian artifacts including pottery, arrowheads, weapons, and jewelry have been found, testifying to the use of the cave by the Cherokees.

One of the cave’s earliest visitors was a giant Pleistocene jaguar whose tracks have been found deep inside the cave. Some 20,000 years ago the animal apparently lost his way in the darkness and wandered for days before plunging into a crevice far from the daylight he sought. Some of the bones, discovered in 1939, are now on display in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Others, along with plaster casts of the tracks, are among the exhibits at the visitor center of the Lost Sea.

During the 1800’s:

When the first white settlers arrived in the Tennessee Valley in the 1820’s they also discovered the cave and used it for storing potatoes and other vegetables. The constant 58° temperature provided an ideal refrigeration system for food.

The 1863 date that you see is an original date. The date has been carbon tested and it does prove to be authentic. The date was probably put there from the carbon of a confederate soldier’s torch. This is the oldest known date in the cave.

During the Civil War the Confederate Army mined the cave for saltpeter, a commodity necessary to the manufacture of gunpowder. A diary of the period reveals the intriguing story of a Union spy who penetrated the guarded cave and nearly succeeded in blowing up the mining operation before he was captured. He was, according to the diary, shot near the large gum tree at the cave entrance.

Ben Sands’ Discovery

Throughout the early history there were consistent rumors of a large underground lake somewhere deep within the cave, but it was not actually discovered until 1905. In that year a 13-year-old boy named Ben Sands wiggled through the tiny, muddy opening 300 feet underground and found himself in a huge room half filled with water. The room was so large that his light was swallowed up by the darkness long before reaching the far wall or the ceiling. For the rest of his life Sands delighted in describing how he threw mudballs as far as he could into the blackness and heard nothing but splashes in every direction.

The full extent of the Lost Sea is still not known despite the efforts of teams of divers armed with modern exploration equipment. The visible portion of the lake is 800 feet long by 220 feet wide. Glass-bottomed boats powered by electric motors carry visitors onto the lake, which is stocked with some of the largest Rainbow trout in North America. Fishing, incidentally, is not permitted.

Beneath the calm waters of the four-and-a-half acre lake divers have discovered an even larger series of rooms completely filled with water. More than 13 acres of water have been mapped so far and still no end to the lake has been found. One diver ventured into the water-filled rooms with a sonar device. Hugging the wall to assure his ability to find his way back, he took soundings in all directions and found nothing but more water.

The Beginning of The Lost Sea Adventure:

In 1915 the idea of developing the cave for the public was conceived. A dance floor was installed in one of the large upper rooms. Cockfights were another frequent activity in the cave. Meanwhile, other portions of the vast system were being utilized by moonshiners to produce that famous brew for which the mountains are famous.

The fascinating history of Craighead Caverns provides plenty of spice for tour guides as they lead groups on the hike through the immense rooms leading to the Lost Sea in the deepest reaches of the cave. Along the way visitors are treated to a wide variety of interesting formations including several displays of rare crystalline structures called “anthodites.” These fragile, spiky clusters commonly known as “cave flowers” are found in only a few of the world’s caves. Their abundance in Craighead Caverns led the United States Department of the Interior to designate the Lost Sea as a Registered National Landmark, an honor the Lost Sea shares with such unique geological regions as the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina and the Yosemite National Park in California."

Ok, here are our pictures.

Bacon Strips

Cave Flowers, rare crystalline formations

Authentic Date

It's 140 feet down, and all the time we were thinking we have to get back up!!!

Down we go..........

nearly there

We arrived at the bottom.

We took our masks off for our picture

The water was so blue

Rainbow Trout were introduced into the lake several years ago to see if there was an exit from the cave.  They didn't leave and so didn't find any exits. There is no natural food for them here so the guides feed them on the boat trip. They gather around when they see the boat. She told us not to put our hands in the water as they would bite!!

We had a question and answer session during the boat ride which was quite interesting.  Someone asked if any other fish had been introduced to the lake, and the guide said no. The trout were best suited to the conditions as there isn't anywhere for them to lay eggs, and so the population can be controlled. 

Bryan & I discussed this and are not sure we agree with what they are doing. These trout are really only there now as an attraction for the tourists and not living in their natural habitat. They are fed well though but I don't think that is enough.

I thought we would go further into the cave on the lake but we really didn't go far and actually I was also relieved as there were no life jackets and the depth was up to 70 ft. Eeek, for someone who can't swim that's scary, but the dock wasn't too far away.  All we had to do was survive the ice cold water and Bryan pull me to the dock. Hmmm.... Anyway we didn't sink, so all was well.

Everyone was quiet as we made our way off the boat and the guide asked us what we were thinking.  Someone said they weren't looking forward to the walk back out.  That's exactly what I was thinking. 

We set off, fortunately we went back a slightly different way and there were several stops with benches for us to sit on and rest. They saved the day, we'd only seen one set on the way down but there were a lot more on the route back up.

We made it, yay!!