Day 49 - Caves, Caves, And Maybe Just One More Cave

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Today is cave day! We're staying in Luray, so naturally we will be visiting Luray Caverns. There are a couple of other caves in the area, so today will be the day of caves. Since Luray Caverns is our first stop and is only about a mile up the road and doesn't open until 9:00, we were able to take our time about breakfast. Last night we walked into town and picked up a box from the post office, so this morning when the post office opened at 8:30, we walked into town again with what we hope to be the last box of t-shirts to send home. Then we hopped on the bike and headed over to Luray Caverns.

Luray Caverns has expanded over the years from just a show cave, to a complex. It now includes: the Cave, Car & Carriage Museum, Local Museum, Garden Maze, and Rope Climbing and of course cafe's, snack bars, and a couple of gift shops. We arrived at about 9:05 with the first tour at 9:30. This gave us time to putter around the gift shop before the tour began. When we walked down the steps into the cave, we were immediately blown away by the number of formations in the entry chamber. In most caves, you need to descend down into it for a bit before you can see anything special. But Luray, it just hits you as soon as you walk in.

The tour was typical, about an hour, and about a mile of walking, but the rest of the cave was far from typical. Other than Carlsbad Caverns, this was probably the prettiest cave we had ever been in. It certainly had more formations than any other! Most of the cave was opened for the tour, with nothing unexplored, and very little inaccessible. It was just really packed with formations. They had a wonderful reflecting pool, where the water was so still, the ceiling reflected off the water like a mirror. There was even a stalactite organ, where sometime back in the 1950's, someone had picked out about 35 stalactites in one of the chambers and attached solenoids with rubber plungers to them and ran wires to an organ. When the keys were pressed, the solenoid word strike the stalactite with the rubber plunger and make a sound. The 35 stalactites each had a different note so the organ could play songs. At this point, the organ was still there and was sometimes played manually, but mostly the tourguide would just press a button and a sequencer would actuate the solenoids and play a song. It was really awesome! The solenoids and plungers were large enough we could actually see them strike the stalactite.

It was easy to see why Luray Caverns is so popular. Not only is it beautiful, but it is an easy walk with very few low overheads or steep climbs. The only steps were those leading down into the entrance room, and they are in the process of digging a new tunnel to eliminate even those stairs. We were both impressed with the magnificence of Luray caverns. After leaving the cave, and buying the t-shirts we had picked out earlier, we visited the Car & Carriage Museum which turned out to be a nice little museum of horse drawn carriages and early cars, Some of the cars were even foreign which is unusual in an American museum. They even had a Rolls Royce woody which I never knew existed. The museum was small and only took about 20 minutes to tour, admission was included with the cave ticket. We also visited the local museum which had an unusual collection of wood stoves and various tools of the 1800's. There was a blacksmith shop, and a mining trough where you could pan for gold. We just looked at the exhibits and took a few pictures and got ready to head back out. The Garden Maze and Rope Climb were an additional charge and not really our thing.

From Luray, we headed west on US-211 and found it was an awesome motorcycle ride up and over a mountain on our way to our second cave of the day about 30 minutes away called Shenandoah Caverns. After the magnificence of Luray Caverns, we were prepared to be disappointed by Shenandoah Caverns, so we toned down our expectations going in. It turned out to be a nice, middle of the road show cave. It had a lot of the same type formations of Luray, just not in as much abundance. This tour was also an hour, and took us about a mile. But this one had an elevator to bring us down into the entrance chamber. This cave was also fun, and easy to navigate about with very few steps and c limbs. The odd thing about this cave was our tourguide, Hunter. Either I'm just getting older or the tourguides are getting younger, or maybe both, but Hunter must have been at least 16, but looked like about 12. In fact, another tourguide called him Pee-Wee. There were also two young teenage girls on the tour, and Pee-Wee was trying so hard to make time with one of these girls. He was trying so hard, and looking so pathetic, it made me grateful that I am not that young as I would never want to go through that again.

Once outside the cave, we checked out a little museum above the gift shop that had motion detected animated store displays from the late 19th and early 20th century. They were nice, but I couldn't really take pictures because as soon as I got near the display, the motion detector started the display moving and the pictures would be blurry. There was also a big yellow barn which was some sort of farm museum and a large building with something about a tribute to American greatness. Neither really interested us, so we got back on the bike and headed for our third and final cave of the day.

Skyline Cave is up the road about 45 minutes, and it took us back up and over the same mountain with the wonderful motorcycle ride, and then it took us up US-340 which runs parallel to Skyline Drive. It was also a really nice motorcycle ride since we were down in the valley looking up at the mountains the whole time. By the time we arrived at Skyline Caverns, it was getting about 3:00 and there were very few cars in the parking lot compared to Shenandoah and Luray. But we went inside, and the tour started in about 15 minutes. While the other caves had multiple tours going on inside the cave at once, our tourguide and the 7 of us on the tour were the only ones inside the cave this afternoon. It was kind of a little sad. The cave was nice, but it was not a formation cave like Luray and Shenandoah. This was more the swirling river path type cave, like some we have been in before, where the walls and ceilings have large swept paths where the water once ran through. It's really quite beautiful, but not like the the caves we had seen earlier today.

The one thing that Skyline Caverns had that was very different from almost any other cave is the formation of Anthodites which are a kind of crystal formation that was a result of being grown in a sealed chamber that had been a natural vacuum until cave explorers had broken through the clay and released the vacuum from the chamber. These crystals look very different from any we had seen before, and most were covered with a protective screen making picture taking difficult. But at the lowest point of the cave there was a higher, unprotected ceiling that was better for picture taking. The tourguide was nice, and seemed very knowledgeable about the cave, but seemed to have trouble speaking and made it difficult to understand. By the time we finished with Skyline Cavers, we were completely "caved out" for the day. Luckily, Skyline Caverns is only about 1 mile from the entrance to Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive.

So we headed down Skyline Drive, along the same exact path as yesterday, but since we had already visited all the overlooks, we could just kick back and enjoy the 32 mile ride back to the Thornton Gap Entrance at Luray. And that's exactly what we did! We cranked up the tunes and headed out. We only saw another car a couple of times, and they turned off into the overlooks quickly, so for most of the time we were on the road alone and it was awesome!

It was getting close to 5:00 when we made it back to the hotel. We were in the mood for Mexican food, and I remembered seeing something on Yelp. So I checked and there was a Mexican place just a mile up the road and dinner turned out to be excellent. Tomorrow, we head out to what is probably the strangest destination of our trip: the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. This is a closed down state Lunatic Asylum in operation in West Virginia from the mid 1800's to 1994 and from the pictures, it looks like it comes out of some horror movie. Jody's been looking forward to this one all trip, and I hope it lives up to her expectations.

115.0 Miles Today

7606.0 Miles Total

5.002 Gallons Today

192.804 Gallons Total

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