Forty days is a long time to be gone. We started the day in Kentucky, doing a second cave tour this morning. Today’s tour was the “Domes and Dripstones” tour. The literature about the tour rated it as moderate, stated there were about 500 steps total, with an initial descent down 270 of those steps, and the tour was 3/4 mike in length, 2 hours in duration. As we are preparing to board the bus for the short ride to the cave entrance the park ranger goes over these stats again and mentions that some of the path is quite narrow, and the stairs are somewhat “steep”. She also said that we’d be passing by areas of great depth so those with a fear of heights should avoid looking down. This was followed by the standard health warnings for cave tours. It all would have sounded a bit ominous and overwhelming had we not taken a moderately rated cave tour with several hundred steps yesterday. This tour was definitely a bit different. The entrance was through a metal door in the side of a hill. It looked for all the world like the entrance to a subterranean work shed or something. The steps started immediately. They were steep and narrow and twisty and straight down. You had to duck and bend and twist and turn to get around the rocks jutting into the extremely narrow path. There were some people on the tour that i’m Sure we’re extremely uncomfortable with how tight a fit this staircase was. If you were claustrophobic or afraid of heights, this was NOT the place for you. But, oh my goodness, the cave was amazing. This was the “domes” part of the tour. Justvterrific souring heights and depths and tight little domed spaces. Alex and I loved it, Ben and Mike were not so comfortable here. This staircase led down to more open rooms of the cave like we saw yesterday then on to a wetter part of the cave and the beautiful Dripstones formations. We opted to take the extra 98 steps to a lower room to see even more of the formations. My only beef about the tour was o felt we spent too much time in the two break rooms listening to the ranger talk and we were hurried through the sites really really fast, with virtually no time to look. Time could have been managed better. There was a large group of teenage Korean boys that didn’t speak much English. Their guide stayed at the head of the entire tour group and left the boys at the back. The ranger was forever getting after the boys for not following the rules, their guide didn’t seem to care much about explained ngvthings in a language they could understand. There was also a family with2 very young children - the baby under 2 for sure. Poor kid wanted nothing to do with the confines of the tour, screamed for half of the tour but eventually fell asleep. Felt really bad for the parents, they looked a little worse for wear by the end.
Then it was on to St. Louis. We hit some rain about 100 miles out, made fora hairy drive. But the weather cleared by the time we got here. Our hotel is right across the street from the arch. We have a very early morning ticket time for the arch ride. Anxious to see the inside of it. It’s quite an amazing structure from the outside. It seems so tall. I mean, it IS tall, but because of the way it’s build, where it’s built, and it’s surroundings it seems even taller than it is. It’s 630 feet tall and 630 feet wide at the base. Largest man made arch in the world, largest man made monument.
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