Mammoth Cave National Park

Day four of our vacation was mine and Brian's favorite day.  We drove a little over an hour north of Nashville to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.  I have been wanting to visit this park for some time.  It did not disappoint.  This place is Uh-Maz-Ing.  The Mammoth Cave system is the longest cave system in the world.  They have mapped out 400 miles of cave passageways, and still have not explored the whole thing.  Since we were making the trip all the way up there, we wanted to be sure that we got the most bang for our buck.  So, I reserved two 2-hour guided tours (4 hours total in the caves).  I was a little worried about how the kids would handle spending that much time below ground, but my worries were for naught.  After our last tour ended we passed a group getting ready to go down, and the kids asked if we could go back down with them.

When planning out which guided cave tours to take, I was overwhelmed with all of the different options.  Brian and I discussed which tours would be best considering the parts of the cave that we would like to see (cause you can't see it all) and the fact that we had two small children in tow.  We decided to go with one tour that began in the new entrance and one that began in the historic entrance.  Our first tour was the "Domes and Dripstones" tour.  We entered the cave through a winding staircase and proceeded 250 feet below the ground.  The "new" part of the cave is the part that has some stalagmites and stalactites, though not as many as in other caves that we've been through in the past.  The main attraction of this tour seemed to be the "Frozen Niagara" flowstone, which was pretty impressive.  The guide spoke a lot about how the cave was formed and answered all of our questions.  The bad news is that about half of our tour group was comprised of fourth graders on a field trip.  Those kids know they could ask some questions.  The most popular (and often repeated) question from the field trip kids was "What should I do if a bunch of bats attack me in the cave?"  These kids were obsessed with bats attacking them, and the guide kept telling them that there are no bats in this part of the cave.  That didn't stop them from asking, though.  In spite of the somewhat noisy company, the tour was great.  We were not attacked by bats, so that was a bonus.

We had about an hour and an half to kill between our first and second tours.  The second entered the caves through the "Historic Entrance"  Even though we were in the same cave system, the two areas that we toured could not have been more different.  I could not believe how massive the rooms were in this part of the cave.  It was overwhelming.  Think a room underground that is as about twice the size of a gymnasium- and that isn't even the largest room in the cave system.  I really wish that I could have captured the enormity of this cave on film.  But lighting underground is terrible and we couldn't use a flash.  We were just in awe.  The "Historic Tour" focused on the history of the cave, which was way more interesting than it sounds like it would be.  Our guide was great, and we had no field trip groups on this tour (hooray).

Sometimes we go places and make no plans to return because we feel like we've "been there and done that".  This is not one of those.  I really do think that we all could have done another walking tour and still not have been satisfied.