Christmas, Part 2
We spent Christmas Day in Alabama - it was kind of nice to go south and get a break from the cold, even if the 38-deg + drizzle didn't feel particularly cozy. It ain't the heat, it's the humidity! That damp just seeps in when least expected. Still, after having a white/grey/slushy/white/icy two weeks before Christmas, the non-white Christmas was just fine by me.
I couldn't really think of anything cool to get for D. this year. The present-exchange aspect of Christmas was kind of awkward, as we'd already asked for and received everything we could possibly think of with the wedding registry, and then our parents grilled us each separately and together about what they could possibly get either of us. The things I really want are the intangible - yet still selfish, I've got a knack for that - lovely things of life: that local PBS would broadcast Dr. Who so I could've seen the Christmas special, that the practical aspects of life would avoid falling apart for a while, that I'd get a huge number of job applications out in the next two weeks without freaking out, or better yet, that I'd get a good job offer. All the little items that I'd noticed that D could make good use of if he had them, I just told his parents about, leaving me without options (well, the socks wouldn't have been particularly romantic anyway), so I ended up with the fine plan of giving him a vacation! I considered springing it on him unannounced, but thought better of it, just so I could double-check the planning. I did make him guess our destination before I told him the details, though.
Mammoth Cave is famous for its size - it's a 300+ mile network of tunnels, but the ones that tours go through cover about 10 miles, and that skips the tiny passageways and sideshoots and crazy stuff. The kind of things we were walking down were like a mole the size of a ranch-style house had dug a burrow. Behold, one of the many "avenues" - I think this is "Cleaveland Avenue", right by the entrance where there's not much height.
Of course, the passages do get pretty narrow, even on a main route. It was all carved out of the limestone mountain by the flow of an underground river, so in the fast-flowing parts, the canyon walls are pretty close together. Too dark to get any distance on the images, but it was fascinating to see the walls above us banking with the curves - easy to imagine it carved by water.
Almost all of the cave system is very dry now; it's not like Carlsbad or the classic cavescape with tons of dripping stalactites, etc. The impressive part is the sheer size of the caverns, and the width of the passages, and the fact that you just keep walking and walking and walking, and there's still more cave back there. The main cave passages are on a couple of different strata of the limestone, and the bottom layer is the underground river - after carving beds on each layer in turn, the water table has moved down, leaving the upper levels totally dry. Thus, no liquidy-looking rock formations. What you do get is gypsum blossoms on the walls - sometimes spikey, sometimes like little ping-pong balls. We had a coffee stop in the "Snowball Room", note all the knobbly bits over his head:
The underground river/lake parts are pretty fr underground, and are fragile ecosystems, so they don't let the tours go poking around at it (except for one corner, that wasn't even on the route I chose to send us on), but there are reputedly pigmentless eyeless fish that have adapted to living only there. Pretty groovy. We did see the river above-ground, though.
There's a sandstone cap on the mountains (pretty common for the southeast) that protects all the limestone layers from vertical water flow, but wherever there are cracks, water seeps through, so there's one end of the caves that pokes out from under that sandstone layer, and is, thus, full of drips, stalactites, and drapery formations. Beautiful area. I kind of screwed up all the photos, though I was convinced at the time that they'd be okay. It's as if the more interesting the subject matter, the crappier my photography skills are. Or maybe the deficiency is just less apparent on boring shots. :)
My only consolation is that the shots did at least somewhat come out, which is more than we could make D's camera do. If you want to see you pretty the park really is, you'll have to check the park website - they've got much better photos there. My one pseudo-artsy shot, thanks to the Christmas tree in their main historic cavern; they have an annual carol-sing in early December, and the tree was still up when we were there. I love the silhouette of our guide, with his flashlight and Smokey-Bear hat. He's talking about the saltpeter mines of 1812. (pole in the foreground)
We spent about 6 hours underground, and a little while hiking. The whole area around the park is full of Tourist Attractions - things like bumper cars and go-cart races and olde-time-photos and large fiberglass dinosaurs, petting zoos, and redneck minigolf... in short, everything a family vacation could possibly want, though of course it was all pretty much hibernating till spring. It would be kind of fun to go back sometime - there are more tour routes running in summer than in winter, and it would be fun to hike around some, too. We spent one night in a cabin there, then headed to southern Illinois for the last stop on the family tour.
I couldn't really think of anything cool to get for D. this year. The present-exchange aspect of Christmas was kind of awkward, as we'd already asked for and received everything we could possibly think of with the wedding registry, and then our parents grilled us each separately and together about what they could possibly get either of us. The things I really want are the intangible - yet still selfish, I've got a knack for that - lovely things of life: that local PBS would broadcast Dr. Who so I could've seen the Christmas special, that the practical aspects of life would avoid falling apart for a while, that I'd get a huge number of job applications out in the next two weeks without freaking out, or better yet, that I'd get a good job offer. All the little items that I'd noticed that D could make good use of if he had them, I just told his parents about, leaving me without options (well, the socks wouldn't have been particularly romantic anyway), so I ended up with the fine plan of giving him a vacation! I considered springing it on him unannounced, but thought better of it, just so I could double-check the planning. I did make him guess our destination before I told him the details, though.
Mammoth Cave is famous for its size - it's a 300+ mile network of tunnels, but the ones that tours go through cover about 10 miles, and that skips the tiny passageways and sideshoots and crazy stuff. The kind of things we were walking down were like a mole the size of a ranch-style house had dug a burrow. Behold, one of the many "avenues" - I think this is "Cleaveland Avenue", right by the entrance where there's not much height.
Of course, the passages do get pretty narrow, even on a main route. It was all carved out of the limestone mountain by the flow of an underground river, so in the fast-flowing parts, the canyon walls are pretty close together. Too dark to get any distance on the images, but it was fascinating to see the walls above us banking with the curves - easy to imagine it carved by water.
Almost all of the cave system is very dry now; it's not like Carlsbad or the classic cavescape with tons of dripping stalactites, etc. The impressive part is the sheer size of the caverns, and the width of the passages, and the fact that you just keep walking and walking and walking, and there's still more cave back there. The main cave passages are on a couple of different strata of the limestone, and the bottom layer is the underground river - after carving beds on each layer in turn, the water table has moved down, leaving the upper levels totally dry. Thus, no liquidy-looking rock formations. What you do get is gypsum blossoms on the walls - sometimes spikey, sometimes like little ping-pong balls. We had a coffee stop in the "Snowball Room", note all the knobbly bits over his head:
The underground river/lake parts are pretty fr underground, and are fragile ecosystems, so they don't let the tours go poking around at it (except for one corner, that wasn't even on the route I chose to send us on), but there are reputedly pigmentless eyeless fish that have adapted to living only there. Pretty groovy. We did see the river above-ground, though.
There's a sandstone cap on the mountains (pretty common for the southeast) that protects all the limestone layers from vertical water flow, but wherever there are cracks, water seeps through, so there's one end of the caves that pokes out from under that sandstone layer, and is, thus, full of drips, stalactites, and drapery formations. Beautiful area. I kind of screwed up all the photos, though I was convinced at the time that they'd be okay. It's as if the more interesting the subject matter, the crappier my photography skills are. Or maybe the deficiency is just less apparent on boring shots. :)
My only consolation is that the shots did at least somewhat come out, which is more than we could make D's camera do. If you want to see you pretty the park really is, you'll have to check the park website - they've got much better photos there. My one pseudo-artsy shot, thanks to the Christmas tree in their main historic cavern; they have an annual carol-sing in early December, and the tree was still up when we were there. I love the silhouette of our guide, with his flashlight and Smokey-Bear hat. He's talking about the saltpeter mines of 1812. (pole in the foreground)
We spent about 6 hours underground, and a little while hiking. The whole area around the park is full of Tourist Attractions - things like bumper cars and go-cart races and olde-time-photos and large fiberglass dinosaurs, petting zoos, and redneck minigolf... in short, everything a family vacation could possibly want, though of course it was all pretty much hibernating till spring. It would be kind of fun to go back sometime - there are more tour routes running in summer than in winter, and it would be fun to hike around some, too. We spent one night in a cabin there, then headed to southern Illinois for the last stop on the family tour.