101 Places to See Before You're 12 - A Big Cave

A BIG CAVE

Back in December 2006 we stopped at Mammoth Caves, Kentucky on our way back from spending the holidays with family.  David had been dying to tour the caves since we moved back to the States and were within driving distance.

I have somehow misplaced the digital copies of these photos and only had these two printed out to scan.  The boys look so young!  (They were 4 and 6 when we were there).

This is outside the Visitor's Center at the caves. 

And here we are in the big amphitheater type room down in the caves.  In order to experience complete darkness, they turn the lights off in the cave for 1 minute - it was indeed eerily dark.  The caves were a lot of fun to explore.  The only difficulty was that the very, very steep steps were wet and our 4 year old refused to let anyone hold his hand going down the steep, wet steps.  We were sure he was going to tumble, but he didn't.

Mammoth Caves are the world's longest recorded cave system in the world - with more than 360 miles of mapped caves.

From the Book:

#26 - A Big Cave

Caves have kind of a bad reputation.  In books and movies they're often the place where scary things (or people!) are hiding:  creepy bats, mean grizzly bears, ghosts, fugitives from the law, etc.  But to see the other side of the story, you really have to go to a cave - a really big, world-class cave.  Underground lakes, rivers, waterfalls, walls made of crystal, chambers the size of football fields: you can find all of this in caves, plus a few bats, too.