The Lost Sea Caverns are near Sweetwater, Tennessee. The first time I visited here my family and I rode from Cleveland, Tennessee about midway through a two-week motorcycle vacation. This was the first cave I'd visited since Dixie Caverns in Virginia when Mary was a baby. It was wonderful! We were led down a bright yellow corridor into a beautiful dark and colored world. We saw cave flowers, crystals grown from stone, huge echoing rooms and then rode a little flat-bottomed boat out into a pool.

The second time I visited Lost Sea I was with twelve young teenagers. We carried our sleeping bags, bottles of water and brownies. This time we entered by the "traditional" entrance. Our guide unlocked the padlock and a huge rusting metal door creaked open. We paused in the entrance for the disturbed crickets and spiders to settle down before we entered. We started down steep wooden stairs wedged between slanting boulders; the wood steps soon gave way to similarly shaped stairs cut into the clay floor.

We spent the night "wild caving" with a guide who taught us how to wear the helmet and how to wedge yourself up and down a crack. We learned how to roll out of a squeezey place and how to wiggle our way into and out of some of the closest spots I'd ever been in. It was a good thing it was so dark so the girls couldn't see how dirty they were becoming.

The next day we all looked rather orange from the mud that somehow crept through our clothes to stain our skin.