Lost

The past few days have been pretty action packed. The soccer teams that we coach both lost on Thursday. Our A team to a clearly superior team from Farragut, and our B team to a team that outplayed them. The A team lost 3-0, while the B team gave up two late goals to lose 2-1. Not bad showings, though, since they played hard. All in all a much improved performance from Monday, especially for the A team.

The highlight for the week is definately that Mandi's friends Emily and Rachel from Harding came in to town. We spent today touring around some things that I hadn't been to in quite a while that are in the area. The first stop in the morning was the Mayfield Dairy Farm. Now, this might not sound like much, but it was fairly interesting. You got to see the bottling plant where all the milk is processed, as well as how they make the jugs and get everything together. Mayfield is apparently the last dairy to use this machine that boils the milk in order to get the bad flavors out of it. I don't remember the name of the machine, but it was a pretty neat little contraption. The dissappointing thing was that we weren't able to see the ice cream plant since they are only operational during the week. We did, however, eat some ice cream, as they had a double scoop cone/cup available for $2. I had myself some strawberry cheesecake and chocolate cream pie ice cream. The chocolate cream pie is a new flavor that they're trying out, and I have to say that it was quite good.

Our second stop was at a place called the Lost Sea. It's the largest underground lake that is known about. You go in to the cave, and go down some 500 feet. They have a nice tour that walks you around the cave and points out the interesting features and everything, and then you go down to the lake, which they say is about 4.5 acres in size. You get in a boat, and they drive you out and around on it. The water was low today, as they say that it's down about 15 feet from the average. You could see the calcium line on the rock around the edge of the lake, and we were able to drive back farther on the lake then they normally do. In fact, part of where we were under is usually under water when the lake is at normal levels. They also have an all night tour where you essentially go caving and spend the night in one of the larger caverns that they have down there. Pretty cool stuff, and one of the cool things that you might not find out about in the area of East Tennessee.