Mammoth Amounts of Fun

So, I have lived in Kentucky for over 75% of my life (thank you, trusty calculator for your help) and up until Monday, I have never been to Mammoth Caves. In fact, for 10 of my wonderful childhood years, I lived 40 minutes from Mammoth, and my sisters often went, however, I was always, "too young to go." Translation: they didn't want an 8 year old tagging along with them. It's sad, but true.

Knowing that we didn't want to spend Memorial day at home, wasting away, we decided to drive down and finally see what all the hoopla was about. We had planned on taking a tour, but we got a late start to the day, and arrived about 15 minutes later than we wanted. Well, actually we arrived 45 minutes too early, because we forgot about the time difference. Doh! It didn't matter anyway, because the tour had already sold out. Instead, we took the self guided tour, which turned out to be a great thing. Turns out, Mammoth Caves are just mammoth, and that's all. I mean, that's great....it's one of the largest cave systems in the world, which is really cool, right? But I suspect that the majority of the cave is just a hollowed out inside of a rock, with not much to see. So, we saved ourselves some $$ and a lot of time by just going down and wondering around the beginning of the cave ourselves. Most of our pictures turned out dark (...imagine that, dark pictures in a cave), but here are a few:

Maryn and Me at the entrance of the cave

In the Rotunda Room

Since we couldn't get into a tour at Mammoth Caves, we decided to scour some of the other existing caves in the area. We'd found a pamphlet on a privately owned cave system just outside the park called Diamond Caves, so we headed out that way. We were not disappointed. It was much smaller, but the geology (is that the right word?) was MUCH more interesting. We went down with a small group of people and our tour guide. Our tour was only an hour long, but when you are carrying a sleeping baby, that's enough time. It was a wet, drippy cave which created a lot of stalagmites and stalactites, whereas Mammoth was dry and dusty due to the layer of sandstone above it. The lesson we learned is this: wet and drippy is WAY more interesting than dry and dusty. Oh, except when really cold water drips from the tall ceiling onto your sleeping baby's face--that was pretty rude. They even turned out the lights for a few minutes so we could experience the total darkness. Yeah, between my crazy fear of small confined spaces and the pitch black, I almost had a heart attack at that point. Our pictures don't do it much justice, but you can use your imagination.

Some of the views while walking along the path. The picture on the right is of "cave bacon." Pretty cool, eh?

It was a pretty good way to spend our Memorial Day. I got to finally see Mammoth Caves, Kade got a break from studying, Maryn got her candy from the gift shop, and Ailee got to spend most of the day in her mom's arms. Sounds like we all won!