The entrance to the cave seemed a little bit scary. Maybe I've just seen too much Criminal Minds, but it reminded me of scenes I have watched in the show where victims are taken to desolate, underground, dug into the side of a hill kind of locations to be tortured.
Once inside, the darkness and the sudden cold was a little disorienting, but the winding staircases and tight "hallways" were interesting as well. I took some photos looking down the staircases and they are all so weird, they came out dark, blurry, and it's hard to tell which way is up.
The huge rooms of the cave were absolutely beautiful. A word my mother-in-law uses came to mind: scariful. The quality of being simultaneously beautiful and scary. It was both intriguing and terrifying to look around and appreciate the cave formations, and wonder what would happen should the walls fail, or if we got lost from the group etc...
While in the cave I kept thinking of the story, Alice in Wonderland, specifically the part near the beginning where she peeks then moments later stumbles into the hollow of a tree trunk saying, "What a peculiar place to give a party...Curious and curiouser!" The threat of falling into the complete darkness of the cavernous holes remained ominous, yet I couldn't stop peeking over the edge of railings. The girls loved exploring!!
It was neat to see the different textures of the walls. There were rough, porous looking walls like the photo above and other sections of walls looked very smooth and rolling like the one below.
Entire sections of some walls were cut out and missing.
Two parts of our tours that the girls loved the best {these stretches in fact weren't long enough for Emma, she kept asking "was that it, can't we do more?"} were Tall Man's Misery and Fat Man's Misery. Named this way because of our need {except Rebekah} to squat down and hunch over to get through and then turn sideways and squeeze through the very narrow passageways.
In this photo notice the small glowing lines above and to the right of Emma's head. Those are the straps of the backpack I was wearing. As we moved through the cave the tour guide could turn on dim lights along the path. Other than that, it was total darkness. At a point during each of our tours the guides gave us the opportunity to experience that darkness by extinguishing all forms of light on our tour. It was the kind of darkness that your eyes would never be able to adjust to, as we learned in our brief minutes of total darkness. There was not even the tiniest glimmer of light anywhere for the straps of my backpack to grab onto. I was holding it in my lap and the glow-in-the dark was completely useless. If anyone had the inclination of separating from the group I'm sure the thought of spending time alone in that condition made them re-think that.
But don't worry, there was a phone available for making emergency calls ~ should you be able to find it.
And these bugs were everywhere on the cave ceilings.
Surprisingly, or maybe not so since they don't like people, this is the only bat we saw the whole day!
Amazing stalactites.
As we left the cave, it was weird to walk around outside imagining what we were standing on top of. It was cool.
A funny memory from the caves is that as we were hurrying along to hike a little circle route that led to a scenic overlook and get back to the visitor center on time for our next tour, I was rushing Rebekah to keep up. She kept sitting along the path jotting down answers in her Junior Ranger book. The more I pushed her to keep walking, the more she kept insisting with a whine, "I want to do my homework!!" I saw a woman watching Rebekah with amusement and after the scene replayed itself four or five times the lady laughed and said something to me about how I should appreciate the moment because she never had to beg any of her kids to stop doing homework.
I've decided to try to record as many little stories like that as I can, either here on the blog or in my own little notes to myself or the girls because I can't even explain how many times a day the girls say or do something small and I think oh, I'm gonna blog about that. And very often, I don't ever get around to it, or the post I am working on gets so long with photos and such that I leave it off, but I think years from now if the girls ever come back here to read this stuff, that is probably what they will enjoy the most. So I am trying to be better to include what is most important :-)
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