As everyone already knows, I spend a lot of my time blogging and, in fact, have become a full time blogger. I sometimes I will spend hours working on my blog on days and sometimes I just log on and make a single post before logging off. I spent most of my morning doing that today. A short period of time was dedicated to my book, but I ended up exceeding the time I had givin myself and ended unable to check on my blog before breakfast was made (the reason that I may have not replied to some comments or questions).Breakfast was short, it was just cereal. Unlike normal days I wasn’t hungry and I only had one bowl instead of the usual two or three that I would have on a normal day. Let me refrase that, actually: on a normal day I would wake up and do the same thing over and over without having breakfast lunch and, if I wasn’t so hungry, dinner. That would describe either my weekend or summer, of course. Now that I am on a huge vacation away (permanately) from everything, my average day would look like today.

Around noon everyone got into the car and then (obviously) we were off. The drive was extraordinarily long, however, I did have a great book to read so by the time we were there I once again didn’t want to get out of the car. Looking back on it I probably shouldn’t have. The wait was an hour long! My brother and I walked to the front desk and gave the man our tickets. A little while passed by when we started telling jokes and conversations, and it helped both of us get through the wait that we wanted (in his case that was work of course).

Of course nobody wants to hear about the waiting necessary in order to go to the caves (I do realize that I have not said where I was going until now, that was part of the suspense for if you didn’t read the title). Anyway: we got our guide who was probably just a couple of years older that I was. She was hilarious though, which made our tour just that much better. We had to hike in hundred degree temperatures across 8 different checkpoints on the mountainside to get to our destination. The worst part was that I was in my BLACK leather JACKET! We needed our jackets for the cave as it would be around 60-70 degrees in there on average. Immediate relief leterally swept past me as I walked through the enterence of the cave.It took the guide a little while to get there because she had left after us, but when she eventually did she then told us the story of how the caves were found and used before we went into the cave to explore what it had to offer.

“Two hunters were hunting game in the wild when one of them saw something odd in the distance: smoke. They went to check it out, and the smoke was coming from the cave. They threw rocks down and tried to see how far they would go: about 50 feet or so. They wanted to check it out but knew that they were un-equipped for the job. They came back a little while later (six YEARS, actually) and checked it out. What is the first thing that someone would ask when making a new discovery? How can I make some money from this. They got a local from the area to check it out and they started leading tours right after. The CCC however came and took it away because they had found it on their land. They put a lock over the gate that they founders had originally put over it and claimed it as theirs. They had, however, heard of bolt cutters. They cut through the bars and illegally lead tours until 1933 when it was officially shut down.

When going in there was a large metal door that the guide needed to unlock the door (from past experiences with caves I know that they are there so nobody can break in and take anything). Walking in everything was lit by yellowish LED lights that were actually powered by the city energy supply from a very complicated wiring system. On the left, once down the stairs, was a 90 foot cliff that had broken all of the bones in an uncareful man’s body after falling down from half way. I do realize that this post is a long, maybe a little bit TOO long for some of you guys to read all of it, so I’m going to skip to the end so I can simplify it: there were columns and popcorn shaped minerals and thousands of different cave formations that grew everywhere.

It was pretty amazing to see it all everywhere! The guide told us to get away from all stairs and get to the center of the room. Then she turned off all the lights and you could see LESS than nothing, I swear. One man had apparently tried to come down with a flashlight to steal cave formations but his flashlight broke. He went mentally insane. When they found. He thought he was staining up in the middle of a room yet he was really laying on his side with his body partially stuck in a small cave hole! He was down there for 50 hours. Wow. When we were st the end, however, there was a five hundred and fifty three foot cavern that was man made. When the air from outside met with the cool,air inside when they met, however, it would break someone’s skull form the 60 mile an hour winds that came through the chamber. They solved the problem by putting two doors, opening one, closing it, opening the other, then closing it. What a cool place to be able to see!