While the bed at the cabin was fine, nothing is more comfortable than your own bed. But given the pouring rain we heard most of the night, we were all glad to be in a nice dry cabin. So now we would have Poached eggs for breakfast and go to Mammoth Cave for our next tour. It was then I learned I couldn't boil water. The kitchen came stocked with an electric stove, so I put on a pot of water and turned on the stove and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Loaded up the car.
And waited.
Finally, the water got to at good 150 degrees. Needless to say that electric stove was close to useless. But it was good enough for fried eggs.
So after loading up the van and turning in the keys we went to Mammoth cave for the Historic Tour.
The brochure for the Historic Tour says:
Entering the cave through the Historic Entrance, you will feel the excitement that intrigued the earliest explorers and visitors. Experience the history and the role Mammoth Cave played during the War of 1812. Large passages invite you to imagine what it would have been like for prehistoric discoverers who walked these passages more than 2,000 years ago. Descend into the lower levels of the cave and follow in the footsteps of the first explorers who crossed the Bottomless Pit. Squeeze through Fat Man’s Misery. Climb 155 stairs up Mammoth Dome and exit through the Historic Entrance. •2 hours, 2 miles. Tour limit: 120. Total stairs: 440, including 155 at Mammoth Dome. Elevation change: 300’. •Limited areas of the Mammoth Cave Discovery, Mammoth Passage, Star Chamber, River Styx and Violet City Lantern Tours are visited on this route. •Meets at the Visitor Center. Difficulty: Moderate.
Now I know why they call this Mammoth Cave. It is over 390 miles long and they haven't finished mapping it out yet, but when it was named nobody could have known how long it was. Instead Mammoth Cave gets its name from the Historic Entrance. It is the biggest cave entrance I have ever seen.
The guide this time was a little more sarcastic. Warning us that if we are prone to claustrophobia, we may want to go see some other National Park. This is a cave after all. The tour took us where slaves used to mine for saltpeter, a trip through Fat Man's Misery, and the Bottomless Pit. Most of the tour was wide open in huge rooms. This was nothing like the Frozen Niagara Tour, there was no water anywhere to be found in the cave. No Stalactites. No flow-stone. Just wide tunnels and huge rooms. That is until you reach Fat Man's Misery. That is where the tunnel narrows and the ceiling descends and if you are fat and tall you are in big trouble. No issue for kids though, they hardly noticed the ceiling descend or the narrow passageway. A nice benefit to being 5 years old.
Taking pictures in the cave was difficult, I still hadn't figured out the blue hue problem, but this cave brought in another problem. Dust spots. The other cave were wet and fairly humid. This one was dry as a bone, so dust was flying everywhere. You couldn't see it until you used the camera flash, where they became very noticeable.
The tour ended with us climbing up a long narrow staircase, until we made a complete circle and arrived back at the huge entrance once again. This was a much longer tour than any other we had taken. It was a little longer than 2 hours, but very enjoyable. Once out of the cave we had to step through a Lysol solution to clean our shoes. Apparently there is a disease going around the caves in Europe and America that is killing a very large number of bats, and they are hoping that this solution will stop the disease from spreading further. I asked why they didn't make us use it before we went into the cave and they said, "since you haven't been to a cave in those shoes before you should be okay." But this is Cave City, there are a ton of caves around and the private ones don't require you to clean your shoes like this.
A few words about the pictures...
The first picture shows water flowing into the cave from the main entrance. The water flows for about 20 feet into the cave and then goes underground. That is about the only water you see during this tour.
The man behind Stacy in picture number eight is named Joe, he wanted to make sure I remembered that.
I really wanted to get some pictures of Fat Man's Misery, but we had to move fast since it was single file with no way of getting in front of the next person, and something weird happened to the camera's settings at that point so none of the pictures turned out. Oh well.
Once the tour was over we ate lunch and bought some postcards at the book store. After that we did the tourist thing, bought some souvenirs (I got fudge). And went to Mike's Mystery House. With a coupon it was a free tour of a house that was built at an angle, so it looks like you are leaning at about a 30 degree angle when you are standing straight up. It really messes with your sense of direction.
Now it was time for our last cave: Diamond Caverns. This is a private cave right outside of Mammoth Cave National Park. It is a very wet cave and has brilliant formations all over. When we got there I was a little nervous. There was a bunch of college age students standing outside smoking and sitting in the chairs looking like they were waiting for the next tour. Turned out that they had already been down in the cave and the only other people on the tour was a family with two kids just a little older than Elisabeth.
The tour guide was college age and seemed to know what he was talking about. He told us about the Cave Wars of the early twentieth century where employees of competing caves would break the stalactites of rival caves so they could say their cave was better. I hadn't mentioned this yet, but at some point in every tour the guide would turn off all the lights and let you see what total darkness looks like. It was during this tour that I finally figured out how to take pictures in dark places, so we actually have a couple of nice pictures of Diamond Caverns.
Diamond Caverns was probably the best cave for seeing amazing formations, it was an incredible cave and a good end to our cave experience.
Until the 1980s, Weddings were performed at Diamond Caverns, Hence the podium with a cross on it. One of the most interesting things was the inside of a stalactites. These stalactites were cut open to show what they looked like inside. They look remarkably like the rocks at the petrified forest in Arizona. The guide said that originally people believed you could determine the age of stalactites the same way as you do a tree, by counting the rings. They abandoned this method quickly though as it apparently gave inaccurate results.
With the end of the cave tour we had one thing we still wanted to do. Go see Dinosaur World. Unfortunately, it was still raining and Dinosaur World is all outside. Matthew Jr. was the most disappointed by this turn of events, but with three tired kids it didn't seem like a good idea. Dinosaur World was also comparatively expense, so you would want to stay for a long time to get your money's worth. In the end, we decided to leave Cave City a little early and head back home. We ate dinner at Golden Corral in Franklin Tennessee, and arrived home at around 8:00pm having had a fun vacation, and a good start to our National Park vacations.
Mammoth Cave was a lot of fun and hopefully we will be able to go back again when the kids are a little older.
We still have to see:
The Alpine Slide.
Dinosaur World.
The Lost River Cave Tour
Horseback riding.
Joe's Diner
Canoeing through Mammoth Cave National Park
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