Sunday, August 15, 2010

Day 2 - Cave City Kentucy to Montgomery Alabama

Today started with a cool dip in the pool for Bill and Lisa ... continental breakfast for everyone - Kentucky apparently boasts the best mushroom-gravy for breakfast, yummy on biscuits.   After that we went off on our adventure to find a Save-a-Lot, but we ended up going to Family Dollar (They had ‘Big League’ chew, we got some) to restock on water and snacks for the ride. 

Soon we were off to our 4 1/2 miles/hours tour 300 ft underground at Mammoth Caves National Park.  It was pretty incredible and a lot of walking.  Originally Mammoth Caves, founed in the early 1800's was named after the man who found it, “Flatt”—but the news paper reporting on it decided that ‘Flatt Caves’ wasn’t a good enough name for the size and scope of these caves, so they used the name ‘Mammoth Caves’ instead. And so the name stuck. There are 392 miles of tunnels and caves explored and charted, with another estimated 600 lying undiscovered under the earth—thus making it the longest known and charted cave system in the world. On our trip though the tunnels we saw many amazing sites, such as the “Frozen Niagara” of Stalactites and Stalagmites, flowering crystal formations of Gypsm covering the walls and ceiling, and the “Grand Canyon” a giant dip approximately 100 ft deep along the path that we had to walk down...and back up.

 The tour guides were great, aside from the terrible geography jokes, but we did learn from talking to one of the guides that the caves used to be used as burial grounds—and that the staff working there claim that it’s haunted after lights out. Most of us have never experienced underground hiking before - we even had lunch in Snowball Cavern!  It was 62 degrees down there, and when we came back out our cameras, glasses and bodies went into shock with the heat!  Around 90degrees today.

Then came the 6 hour "party bus" ride to our next hotel.  We stopped at Shoney's and had all you can eat buffet for supper and back on the road - final destination for the day - Montgomery Alabama.  Only 6 more hours of driving until we reach Biloxi - orientation is tomorrow afternoon and everyone is getting excited to get to work!

Thanks for your prayers and support!

Lee Garrett, Bill Conard, Laura Pelletier, Juli Conard-Myers

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