Mammoth Cave, Kentucky

While in Kentucky, we stopped for a cave tour at Mammoth Cave National Park (http://www.nps.gov/maca ). Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world with over 365 miles of cave that have been explored. The natural entrance to the cave (first picture) is a short walk from the visitors center and has been used as the entrance for touring cave since 1816.

The national park service offers several different cave tours in the park. Picking the tour is not all that easy since there are so many to choose from. My criteria for picking the tour was that the tour had to stop for lunch at the snowball dining room since that is what I remembered most from my childhood visits to the park.

We ended up taking the snowball tour which was two miles round trip from the new entrance and stopped for lunch at the snowball dining room. The highlights of the tour were a trip down the Cleaveland Avenue (a long passage through the cave where you could see hundreds of yards ahead), looking at the gypsum (look for the roses in the 3rd picture), and of course eating hot soup more than 300 feet below the earth's surface under the snowballs (last picture).