Road Trip
by
, 01-20-2010 at 08:47 AM (3826 Views)
So right before New Year's Eve I had to go out to Terre Haute, Indiana. I hate going out there but was obliged for family business so we rented a car and made the 10 hour drive(620 miles). My wife actually looking for something to do out there other then do the normal sight seeing(a ton of stuff in town is named after my family but is pretty boring) looked up some things. She found this place there called inland aquatics, I thought OK a nice fish store to waste an hour in. Holy crap was I wrong. This place was amazing and well worth a good drive to buy livestock from. After looking through their showroom in about an hour and seeing some impressive livestock, my favorite being what I have always wanted epaulette sharks(I think they were also mated) we realized we had not yet seen the warehouse sized back area. This area was insane, pipes and pumps everywhere and all kinds of tubs of corals/liverock with a little livestock in it also.
Now just being a newbie I had no clue what some of their stuff was but it appeared that they were breeding quite a bit of livestock as well as growing/fragging corals and growing/curing live rock.
In one of the large pools in the back we discovered a decent sized fish about 12 -16 inches long and very oval. He was just staring at me. I moved to another side of the pool and he would follow me over there and star and sometimes raise his upper body/dorsal fin area out of the water. I named him "JAWS". It turns out that JAWS was a type of batfish and was very friendly, you could actually pet him in the water. The employee also explained that JAWS would eat all day if posssible. We said goodbyes to JAWS and then moved on staring at more and more interesting coral/live rock pools.
Now it was a good time and we were there for about 3 hours total just marveling in the set ups they had. I explained i was from out of town and they understood I had no intention of buying anything but were still willing to answer my questions. If you live anywhere near this place I highly suggest stopping by.