You may have noticed that I've been posting pretty regularly since mid April of this year (2016). You may have also noticed if you'd been paying particularly close attention that I usually post of Mondays. Today is not a Monday. It's a Friday.
"How dare you Geekboy!" you find yourself exclaiming. "A blog schedule is not something to be taken seriously!" You take out your vintage style pocket-watch and tap it to emphasize how late this post is. Also, you say 'schedule' funny, because you're suddenly a cranky middle aged British man with mutton chops.
Truth be told I was on vacation in Virginia with my family for most of this week. In our many travels we stopped at Grand Caverns, which we soon learned is the oldest touring cave in the US of A.
One of the rooms on the tour is called 'Dante's Inferno'. Our tour guide told us a cool story about this part of the cave. She told us about how miners found some valuable minerals in this section of Grand Caverns, and they wanted to keep their cache a secret. So they started a little ghost story to keep the tourists away.
The miners noticed that their candles would go out when they reached a certain part of the cavern. It was easy to convince everybody that it was 'Evil Spirits' that blew out the candles, even though it was a natural phenomenon. You know what this sounds like?
Yep, that's right. It sounds like the plot for a classic episode of 'Scooby Doo, where are you?' Buried Treasure of some kind, and a creepy story to keep everyone else away. The only things missing is the miners never dressed up in ghost costumes, never said "I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!" and also, there are no meddling kids.
My favorite part of this tour was where they turned all the lights out. And I know what you're thinking. "But Geekboy," you say as you roll your eyes, "They always turn all the lights out." And they do. Every single time. I think it's a requirement of being a cave tour guide. But our guide did it in a way I'd never seen before. She lit a candle first, showing us what it would have been like for the original spelunkers exploring these caves in the 1700s. Then she had one of the kids in the tour blow out the candle. Normally turning out the lights is like a cheap jump scare in a horror movie. It's there to get an extreme reaction from the audience. But this time it wasn't like that. It was subtle and classy, and when she turned the lights back on we got to see just how much those early spelunkers were missing by exploring these caves in the candlelight.
If you're in the Virginia area, make sure you take in a cave or two. And if you've seen a few caverns before, feel free to leave your favorite memories in the comments.
-Geekboy.
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