Luray Caverns
Oct. 26th, 2008 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI was invited upstairs last night to join the Ukrainians on the occasion of a small celebration (обмывание) to mark the acquisition of their new hardware. It was just the way to end a pretty intense week of work, and I got to know the members of the group better. By the end of the evening, I had been invited to come along on a trip planned for today to Luray Caverns, about 50 miles away as the crow flies.
We left bright and early at 8 am, despite false indications from several clocks that the time had reverted from daylight savings last night (a pox on the two blithering idiot Congresscritters who came with the idea of changing the start/end dates for daylight savings, after said dates had been embedded in very nearly every device capable of telling time). The drive was pleasant, but since I did not get much sleep last night I drowsed for much of the way.
The GPS unit that the Ukrainians rented along with their car nearly had a conniption fit when we deviated from its planned route, to drive instead down Skyline Drive, which runs through the Shenandoah National Park. It had originally routed us down the Stonewall Jackson highway, and when we turned into the park instead, it repeatedly instructed us to proceed some fractional amount of the way toward the intersection with route 211 (which would take us to Luray), so that we could turn around and get back onto the unit's originally planned route. Eventually, the GPS got with our program, but it took a while.
The views along Skyline Drive were nice, and I took as many pictures of them as everyone else, but there was too much phototropic haze in the air, so they aren't breathtaking in any way.
We got to the Caverns in due time and joined everyone else in line to see what lay below. Frankly, I wasn't expecting very much, based on long-ago visits to other tourist attractions. Boy, was I wrong in this case!
Granted, our tour guide had poor diction and bounced around like he was avoiding thrown tomatoes, but there was enough around us to see to keep all of us fascinated. What I could hear of the spiel wasn't very informative. At one point, our guide went on at length, telling us that one of the formations in the chamber we were in reminded people of... I didn't quite catch what, but I think it was a cartoon character, another formation reminded people of an ice cream cone or sea shell, while a third was said to remind people of Cinderella's Magic Castle at Disneyland. Go figure.
I and the group I was with were too busy making our own impressions, so I tuned out most of what the guide had to say. We all took tons of pictures. I was most captivated by a section of the cave called Dream Lake. Here are a couple of shots:
I don't know if the guide had a name for this formation, but it reminds me of pictures I've seen of Mont St. Michel, in France. Just a little way down the path was this:
If you look closely at the full-sized image on Flickr, you'll see that the bottom half of the image in the brightly lit part is actually a reflection from a water surface. I found it hauntingly beautiful and serene.
As we walked along the mile-and-a-quarter path through the caverns and admired the formations, it occurred to me that we were looking at very artistically arranged lighting. I thought for a moment about the first modern local resident to go down into the cavern back in 1878, equipped with only a rope and a guttering candle. There is a sign at that location there today, with a large "X" on it.
There was enough variety in the formations to keep me interested all the way through to the end of the tour. At the bottom of our path was a chamber called the Cathedral, which has been the venue of nearly 500 weddings, according to our guide. There is an organ set up in this chamber. It was dedicated in 1957 and connects the keyboard to a number of stalactites that produce musical tones when struck with a rubber hammer mounted on adjacent structures. We listened to an automated rendition of Martin Luther's A Mighty Fortress is Our God, the vibrations from which caused small droplets to rain down on us from the ceiling of the chamber.
On the way back home, we swung by Fredericksburg to visit one of the consultants who was part of our meeting last week and who will participate in this week's meeting as well. He is a very friendly guy with a wonderful family that lives in a very nice house, though his commute is pretty long. We broke bread and pronounced a few toasts, and would have stayed longer, but tomorrow is a work day.
I feel a small tickling at the back of my throat, so I'd better take some vitamin C before hitting the sack.
Cheers...
We left bright and early at 8 am, despite false indications from several clocks that the time had reverted from daylight savings last night (a pox on the two blithering idiot Congresscritters who came with the idea of changing the start/end dates for daylight savings, after said dates had been embedded in very nearly every device capable of telling time). The drive was pleasant, but since I did not get much sleep last night I drowsed for much of the way.
The GPS unit that the Ukrainians rented along with their car nearly had a conniption fit when we deviated from its planned route, to drive instead down Skyline Drive, which runs through the Shenandoah National Park. It had originally routed us down the Stonewall Jackson highway, and when we turned into the park instead, it repeatedly instructed us to proceed some fractional amount of the way toward the intersection with route 211 (which would take us to Luray), so that we could turn around and get back onto the unit's originally planned route. Eventually, the GPS got with our program, but it took a while.
The views along Skyline Drive were nice, and I took as many pictures of them as everyone else, but there was too much phototropic haze in the air, so they aren't breathtaking in any way.
We got to the Caverns in due time and joined everyone else in line to see what lay below. Frankly, I wasn't expecting very much, based on long-ago visits to other tourist attractions. Boy, was I wrong in this case!
Granted, our tour guide had poor diction and bounced around like he was avoiding thrown tomatoes, but there was enough around us to see to keep all of us fascinated. What I could hear of the spiel wasn't very informative. At one point, our guide went on at length, telling us that one of the formations in the chamber we were in reminded people of... I didn't quite catch what, but I think it was a cartoon character, another formation reminded people of an ice cream cone or sea shell, while a third was said to remind people of Cinderella's Magic Castle at Disneyland. Go figure.
I and the group I was with were too busy making our own impressions, so I tuned out most of what the guide had to say. We all took tons of pictures. I was most captivated by a section of the cave called Dream Lake. Here are a couple of shots:
I don't know if the guide had a name for this formation, but it reminds me of pictures I've seen of Mont St. Michel, in France. Just a little way down the path was this:
If you look closely at the full-sized image on Flickr, you'll see that the bottom half of the image in the brightly lit part is actually a reflection from a water surface. I found it hauntingly beautiful and serene.
As we walked along the mile-and-a-quarter path through the caverns and admired the formations, it occurred to me that we were looking at very artistically arranged lighting. I thought for a moment about the first modern local resident to go down into the cavern back in 1878, equipped with only a rope and a guttering candle. There is a sign at that location there today, with a large "X" on it.
There was enough variety in the formations to keep me interested all the way through to the end of the tour. At the bottom of our path was a chamber called the Cathedral, which has been the venue of nearly 500 weddings, according to our guide. There is an organ set up in this chamber. It was dedicated in 1957 and connects the keyboard to a number of stalactites that produce musical tones when struck with a rubber hammer mounted on adjacent structures. We listened to an automated rendition of Martin Luther's A Mighty Fortress is Our God, the vibrations from which caused small droplets to rain down on us from the ceiling of the chamber.
On the way back home, we swung by Fredericksburg to visit one of the consultants who was part of our meeting last week and who will participate in this week's meeting as well. He is a very friendly guy with a wonderful family that lives in a very nice house, though his commute is pretty long. We broke bread and pronounced a few toasts, and would have stayed longer, but tomorrow is a work day.
I feel a small tickling at the back of my throat, so I'd better take some vitamin C before hitting the sack.
Cheers...
no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 01:33 pm (UTC)