Mammoth Cave

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Originally uploaded by ebvImages

Tuesday, I drove the kids and Yaow to Mammoth Cave National Park. Mammoth Cave is the world's largest limestone cave system, with 392 miles of connected caves. It is a national park and a world heritage site. People come from all over the world to see it.

Its a three and a half hour drive into central Kentucky. The drive down was pretty unpleasant, as it was raining most of the way down.

At one point, a car a few hundred feet in front of us went careening across the road, slamming into the guard rails and spinning around at least once. If we had been ten seconds earlier, it could have been bad.

I had purchased tickets ahead of time. Our first tour started at 10:00 a.m., and I was worried that we would be late getting there. When I got to the ticket window ten minutes before the first tour was to start, I saw a clock that showed it was ten till 9:00 a.m.; Mammoth Cave, unlike Cincinnati is in Central time.

We took the Historic tour and the New Entrance tour. The kids liked both tours, although Aleena was pretty tired by the time we started the second. She really didn't like when they turned off all the lights to show total darkness. We fixed that the second time by having her just keep her eyes closed.

On the way back we stopped at the Cracker Barrel for dinner. The service and food were actually both really good.

We arrived back home by 8;30. Seven hours of driving and four hours of walking up and down stairs and through caves made for a pretty long day. Still, it was fun.