Luray Caverns

This was the real impetus for our trip. I've been pretty obsessed with caverns for a while now, and when I realized that some of the best show caverns in North America are clustered in an area of Virginia only a day's drive from here, we decided to plan our summer camping trip around going there.

We visited two caverns on our short trip. The first was Luray Caverns; the largest and most popular site in the region. It was kind of a crazy tourist trap, but completely spectacular nonetheless. We were part of a huge tour group (somewhere between 50-100 people?), which made its way through at a pretty reasonable pace, stopping at major features along the way, where a teenager would give us a short canned spiel about that feature. Surprisingly, I didn't feel very rushed or crowded. The caverns are enormous, and once people spread out, we could lag behind at our own pace. I think by the end we had assimilated into the tour group that was after ours. Most of my pictures are pretty blurry, because it was so dark, but I hope some might work for potential art-making purposes. Here are just a few of the hundreds of shots I took.

And, a couple more shots with people, to show scale:

P.S. Does anyone remember my cavern plate? That was from Luray! I think this trip may have inspired me to keep building on my vintage cavern souvenir collection (the contemporary souvenirs were absolutely horrid).