The plans have been made, the cabin reserved, and everybody is excited to go. One hitch, the weather. On our drive up to Cave City, Kentucky it was pouring rain. At times I wondered if I would have to pull over and wait for the rain to clear. We saw several accidents, and the state police were everywhere. But that didn't matter too much to us. We were going caving. Can't rain on you when you are 100 feet below the surface. We had a cabin, so there wasn't much fear of it blowing away.
After a sack lunch in the car, we pulled into Cave City and for our first stop we went to the Wildlife Museum. The kids loved it. The Wildlife Museum was full of butterflies, bugs, and a whole host of stuffed animals. It was divided into small rooms, where every room had a display of animals to look at. It meandered through the whole museum until you had absolutely no idea where you were in relation to the front desk. It was designed so that a large number of people could be in the building at once without you ever seeing anybody but your own group.
Once that was over, it was time to head over to Kentucky Action Park. We had two things to get done before 4:30pm, check in to the cabin and check out Outlaw Cave. The lady at Kentucky Action Park called up a guide and we got our own personal tour of Outlaw Cave. It is named such because Jesse James once hid in the cave after one of his big robberies. Outlaw Cave was by far the smallest cave we went into during the entire trip, but it was also the cheapest. At $5 a head and children 5 and under free it was a steal. All the same it was fun, and since we hadn't seen the big caves yet, we weren't comparing it to all the other better caves. It was in this cave that I realized I had a problem. My camera did not take good pictures in low light. Obviously I needed the flash turned on, but whenever I did that the picture would have a blue tint to it. It wasn't until the very end of the trip that I figured out how to correctly set the camera to get nice pictures in low light. So unfortunately, most of the pictures this trip would have a blue tint to them.
After the tour we quickly unloaded everything into the cabin and hurried to Mammoth Cave. There wasn't much time, and the best cave tour of the day was about to start. As it turned out Spring break had ended last week and there were very few people at Mammoth Cave. This is exactly how we like it, and why we picked mid-April for our trip. So after buying our tickets at the Mammoth Cave Visitors center we were hurried off onto the Frozen Niagara Tour.
The brochure of the Frozen Niagara Tour says:
Depart by bus and journey over the top of the cave to the Frozen Niagara Entrance. The entrance, created in 1924, makes it possible to see this decorative area of the cave. Walk through a fairyland of formations to learn how travertine is formed. Pass through Rainbow Dome, then see Crystal Lake, Moonlight Dome and Onyx Collonade before arriving at the Frozen Niagara flowstone. Descend steps under the Frozen Niagara formation to visit the Drapery Room before returning to the surface. This easy trip is ideal for people who want a short introduction to Mammoth Cave. •1¼ hours, ¼ mile. Tour limit: 36. Total stairs: 12, plus an optional 98. Elevation change: 40’. •Includes parts of the New Entrance and Grand Avenue tour routes. Not available by reservation. •Meets at the Visitor Center. Difficulty: Easy.
The Frozen Niagara Tour was a really cool tour. It started with a bus ride to another end of the Mammoth Cave National Park property. At this end of the cave there was water everywhere. And wherever you have lots of water, you get amazing formations. Stalactites, Stalagmites, flow-stones, and columns. All very dazzling. The Tour guide was very matter of fact. Her job was to tell you about the cave, and make sure nobody died. She was not the most entertaining tour guide in the world, nor the most informative, but she knew her stuff. Just please wait until they were out of the cave to take her picture, being blinded by a camera flash inside a cave 1,000 times per day was just too much.
I tried playing with my camera settings a little in this cave, but never was quite able to get a good picture without the blue tint.
After the tour, we were starving. So on to dinner at the El Mazatlan. It is named after a big tourist town in Mexico, since Cave City is nothing more than a small tourist town I guess this fits pretty well. The dinner was excellent, but the winner was the salsa. Mexican restaurants always give you chips and salsa before the meal. The stuff they gave us was glorified ketchup, so I asked for some hot salsa. It was a tomatillo based salsa and pretty good, if a little hot for Stacy and Elisabeth. But when you mixed the tomato salsa with the tomatillo salsa, it was absolutely great. It gave me some ideas for my own homemade salsa, hopefully I will eventually be able to make salsa as good as the one at El Mazatlan.
After dinner we picked up Disney's Tangled at Redbox, and went back to the cabin. After popcorn and the movie it was bed time. The cabin was really nice. It had a furnished kitchen, a bunk bed, and a loft. Elisabeth and Matthew slept up in the loft, and Rebekah slept on the bottom half of the bunk bed. It took quite a bit to convince Elisabeth to climb the stairs to get up in the loft, but we eventually got both kids up there and once up they both liked it a lot. We had a big day and tomorrow would be even better.
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