Vacation, Part 1
Last week, my brother and I took a little road trip down to Kentucky to see Mammoth Cave National Park. I haven't been on any kind of trip is sooo long! It was time off well deserved.
We drove down to Kentucky Thursday afternoon. And one thing you have to understand about my brother and me is that although we get along well, we also have a tendency to revert in age when we're around each other. This includes bickering (all in good fun) and general silliness. Yes, grown adults acting like children...XD
Any roadtrip calls for good music and since it was just me and my brother, we simply had to have our childhood classic - Dr. Demento. Twentieth Anniversary Collection only please. It includes such wondrous wonders as:
Also:
Fish Heads by Barnes & Barnes (...eat them up yu~m!)
The Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati by Rose & the Arrangement (For lunch he'd just chew up a suburb or two and for dinner he ate the whole town!)
Star Trekkin' by Firm (It's worse than that, it's physics, Jim!)
Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout would not Take the Garbage Out by Shel Silverstein (The garbage ro~lled on down the hall, it raised the roof, it broke the walls!)
Transfusion by Nervous Norvus (Because barnyard drivers are found in 2 classes...)
and
King Tut by Steve Martin (Buried in his jammies!)
And many other. Oh and we sing along too. Because we've had them memorized since we were like...10. And the ~15 year hiatus from when we first listened to them (over and over) to when we re-discovered them just a year or two ago did nothing to lessen their brilliance.
We stayed Thursday night in a lousy Super 8 hotel in Munfordville - chosen because we thought the town had a funny name (didn't I say "children"?). The next morning we went the extra 15 minutes to the park.
We took the Grand Avenue Tour as led by Ranger Josh.
It was incredible. They bus you a couple of miles from the Visitor's Center to the Carmichael Entrance. You then walk down a ton of stairs (nearly 200) and at the base of the stairs, the cave opens up into a h~uge room. The cave ceiling is very tall and it's very wide too...like the size of a multi-lane freeway.
The cave system was named "Mammoth" for it's horizontal extent (it's by far the longest known cave system in the world - more than 365 miles) but this room was deserving of the name in and of itself. According to Josh, this room was the end of the original "long tour". (End as in, this was the turnaround point, because the Carmichael entrance didn't exist then.)
They have been giving cave tours there for about 200 years. Back then, the guides were slaves and there were only two options. The short tour and the long tour. The long tour was something like 18 hours long! Can you imagine? That long spent underground with only a lantern to light your way?
They did have a lantern at the beginning to show what it would have been like. Some of the tours are led exclusively by lantern like today as well, but not the one we went on.
We also saw:
Gypsum flowers (soft mineral formations) which grow in dry areas of the cave (most of Mammoth Cave is dry)
You can't see gypsum everywhere though, because the Native Americans scrapped it off the walls of the more easily accessible areas.
Historic graffiti in the Snowball Dining Room (yes, we ate lunch there like the first tourist did 200 years ago)
The graffiti was created using the sooty smoke of candles.
Narrow passageways
As I walked through this area, I could imagine the water that would have be rushing through this area thousands of years ago. It helps you understand the relationship of time to the Earth - makes you feel marvelously small. Marvelous, because when you understand how small you are, you can better understand how big the whole world is.
A cave cricket
Despite the whole 6 leg/8 leg thing, I maintain that they look a lot like spiders - there aren't spiders in the caves though.
I don't remember where this was taken, so just enjoy it as is.
Stalactites (found only in the wet parts of the cave)
Frozen Niagara
Use the people as scale for how tall this flowstone is.
We did a lot of hiking up on the surface before and after the tour. Check out the ferns growing out of this rocky ground.
Here's me in front of a cool little rock outcropping that you can't see very well.
Here is where the River Styx emerges from underground.
And here is where the Echo River bubbles up from underground.
When you first look at it, it looks like it's stagnant water, but then you look a little closer and you can see the movement of the water caused by the spring.
This is the ferry you have to use if you want to get across the Green River and over to the north side of the park.
Other cool things that I didn't get pictures of:
- A skink outside the window of the park restaurant where we had dinner.
- A re~ally cool waterfall where a steam of water had worn a narrow but deep notch into the rock.
- The antique car we saw on the way down that had the license plate "OMYGOSH". From a distance it looked like it was painted with a brown snake skin pattern. Close up it turned out to be completely covered in pennies! The first works out of my mouth? "Oh. My. Gosh." XD
- All the hokey looking side attractions in the last stretch of road before entering the park - like Hillbilly Hound putt-putt and go-carts, Dinosaur World, Big Mike's Mystery House and others
- The crazy, right-wing, conservative lady who felt the need to strike up a conversation with us and just assumed that we were of the same political mind as she (when we're pretty much polar opposites) "They'll never take our guns away!" she said. Lady, nobody is trying to take your precious guns away.
- The huge billboard sign proclaiming "HELL IS REAL!" lest we forget we're in Kentucky (and here I thought Indiana was bad)
- Cave badgers and their nemesis, cavern weasels... As you may or may not know, cave badgers, as other cave dwelling creatures, have lost their coloration. Yes, they are transparent and you can see straight through to their internal organs... Let me see if I remember this correctly, they also:
Are as big as a man, walk on two legs on occasion, like to wear hats, hoard diamonds, are afraid of the dark, live exclusively on the south side of the Green River, have high cholesterol from eating trans-fat rich gnats that were genetically engineered by the cavern weasels in their high-tech laboratories (that's la-bor-a-tor-ies, not lab-rah-tor-ies)... Sorry, any little thing was an excuse to add another layer of ridiculousness to this already crazy story. See? This is the kind of silliness that spawns from time spent with my brother. Children, right?
Well, it was a good time. And it's not terribly far away either - about 5 hours. If you're ever in the area, I suggest you go. Just realize that it'll take a lot more than a day and a half if you want to see all there is to see.
We drove down to Kentucky Thursday afternoon. And one thing you have to understand about my brother and me is that although we get along well, we also have a tendency to revert in age when we're around each other. This includes bickering (all in good fun) and general silliness. Yes, grown adults acting like children...XD
Any roadtrip calls for good music and since it was just me and my brother, we simply had to have our childhood classic - Dr. Demento. Twentieth Anniversary Collection only please. It includes such wondrous wonders as:
Click to viewAlso:
Fish Heads by Barnes & Barnes (...eat them up yu~m!)
The Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati by Rose & the Arrangement (For lunch he'd just chew up a suburb or two and for dinner he ate the whole town!)
Star Trekkin' by Firm (It's worse than that, it's physics, Jim!)
Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout would not Take the Garbage Out by Shel Silverstein (The garbage ro~lled on down the hall, it raised the roof, it broke the walls!)
Transfusion by Nervous Norvus (Because barnyard drivers are found in 2 classes...)
and
King Tut by Steve Martin (Buried in his jammies!)
And many other. Oh and we sing along too. Because we've had them memorized since we were like...10. And the ~15 year hiatus from when we first listened to them (over and over) to when we re-discovered them just a year or two ago did nothing to lessen their brilliance.
We stayed Thursday night in a lousy Super 8 hotel in Munfordville - chosen because we thought the town had a funny name (didn't I say "children"?). The next morning we went the extra 15 minutes to the park.
We took the Grand Avenue Tour as led by Ranger Josh.
It was incredible. They bus you a couple of miles from the Visitor's Center to the Carmichael Entrance. You then walk down a ton of stairs (nearly 200) and at the base of the stairs, the cave opens up into a h~uge room. The cave ceiling is very tall and it's very wide too...like the size of a multi-lane freeway.
The cave system was named "Mammoth" for it's horizontal extent (it's by far the longest known cave system in the world - more than 365 miles) but this room was deserving of the name in and of itself. According to Josh, this room was the end of the original "long tour". (End as in, this was the turnaround point, because the Carmichael entrance didn't exist then.)
They have been giving cave tours there for about 200 years. Back then, the guides were slaves and there were only two options. The short tour and the long tour. The long tour was something like 18 hours long! Can you imagine? That long spent underground with only a lantern to light your way?
They did have a lantern at the beginning to show what it would have been like. Some of the tours are led exclusively by lantern like today as well, but not the one we went on.
We also saw:
Gypsum flowers (soft mineral formations) which grow in dry areas of the cave (most of Mammoth Cave is dry)
You can't see gypsum everywhere though, because the Native Americans scrapped it off the walls of the more easily accessible areas.
Historic graffiti in the Snowball Dining Room (yes, we ate lunch there like the first tourist did 200 years ago)
The graffiti was created using the sooty smoke of candles.
Narrow passageways
As I walked through this area, I could imagine the water that would have be rushing through this area thousands of years ago. It helps you understand the relationship of time to the Earth - makes you feel marvelously small. Marvelous, because when you understand how small you are, you can better understand how big the whole world is.
A cave cricket
Despite the whole 6 leg/8 leg thing, I maintain that they look a lot like spiders - there aren't spiders in the caves though.
I don't remember where this was taken, so just enjoy it as is.
Stalactites (found only in the wet parts of the cave)
Frozen Niagara
Use the people as scale for how tall this flowstone is.
We did a lot of hiking up on the surface before and after the tour. Check out the ferns growing out of this rocky ground.
Here's me in front of a cool little rock outcropping that you can't see very well.
Here is where the River Styx emerges from underground.
And here is where the Echo River bubbles up from underground.
When you first look at it, it looks like it's stagnant water, but then you look a little closer and you can see the movement of the water caused by the spring.
This is the ferry you have to use if you want to get across the Green River and over to the north side of the park.
Other cool things that I didn't get pictures of:
- A skink outside the window of the park restaurant where we had dinner.
- A re~ally cool waterfall where a steam of water had worn a narrow but deep notch into the rock.
- The antique car we saw on the way down that had the license plate "OMYGOSH". From a distance it looked like it was painted with a brown snake skin pattern. Close up it turned out to be completely covered in pennies! The first works out of my mouth? "Oh. My. Gosh." XD
- All the hokey looking side attractions in the last stretch of road before entering the park - like Hillbilly Hound putt-putt and go-carts, Dinosaur World, Big Mike's Mystery House and others
- The crazy, right-wing, conservative lady who felt the need to strike up a conversation with us and just assumed that we were of the same political mind as she (when we're pretty much polar opposites) "They'll never take our guns away!" she said. Lady, nobody is trying to take your precious guns away.
- The huge billboard sign proclaiming "HELL IS REAL!" lest we forget we're in Kentucky (and here I thought Indiana was bad)
- Cave badgers and their nemesis, cavern weasels... As you may or may not know, cave badgers, as other cave dwelling creatures, have lost their coloration. Yes, they are transparent and you can see straight through to their internal organs... Let me see if I remember this correctly, they also:
Are as big as a man, walk on two legs on occasion, like to wear hats, hoard diamonds, are afraid of the dark, live exclusively on the south side of the Green River, have high cholesterol from eating trans-fat rich gnats that were genetically engineered by the cavern weasels in their high-tech laboratories (that's la-bor-a-tor-ies, not lab-rah-tor-ies)... Sorry, any little thing was an excuse to add another layer of ridiculousness to this already crazy story. See? This is the kind of silliness that spawns from time spent with my brother. Children, right?
Well, it was a good time. And it's not terribly far away either - about 5 hours. If you're ever in the area, I suggest you go. Just realize that it'll take a lot more than a day and a half if you want to see all there is to see.