Today almost felt like a normal summer day! We woke up at 5:30 and were on the road to Mammoth Cave NP shortly after 6. This is the fourth cave we’ve visited in our adventures and it was completely different than the others. As I said many many times today, Mammoth Cave is incredibly big. We spent seven hours underground covering seven miles of tunnels. We didn’t repeat anything and saw less than one percent of the total cave.
The tunnels were seemingly endless, we just kept walking and they just kept going. What it lacked in beauty it made up for in size. The passages were largely devoid of the features found in other caves. There were only a few rooms along the seven miles that had even a hint of a stalactite.
Our day was broken into two distinct tours which together made up what would have been called the “full-day tour” a hundred years ago. Now the morning portion is called the Grand Avenue tour and the afternoon portion, the Violet City. One of the most interesting stops on the Grand Avenue tour was the lunch counter, complete with restrooms and running water that was installed to give early and mid twentieth century tourists a place to stop when they were taking the full day tour decades ago.
The Violet City tour was lit only by lanterns we carried with us. This provided a perspective similar to the view early tourists would have had as the cave was explored in the early nineteenth century. It was an interesting contrast to the very complete view we had in the morning.
We just finished up a great dinner at Muscles & Burgers in downtown Louisville and are heading to bed at the Crowne Plaza. Sadly, Molly does not approve so it’ll be a rough couple nights here. Sorry, Mol.
I didn’t write last night so I wanted to mention how awesome our early anniversary dinner was. We dined at Henley, the restaurant at the Aertson, and everything about the evening was fabulous. Molly went into some detail about our meal so I won’t repeat. It really was a perfect night though.
