So... after all that nonsense, we did finally make it to Luray Caverns... on the way back home. We love caves and have toured almost every tiny little roadside hole in the ground (literally) from here to Pennsylvania. Luray is by far the biggest and has the most varied formations, although some of the smaller ones are more active and full of beautiful colors. And there's one cave in West Virginia where if you stop the tour guide to ask a question, she will have to start her speech all over from the beginning. Clearly, that one was my favorite. These were ok, but the tour could have been greatly enhanced if the tour guide was a four foot teenager from West Virginia who constantly misspoke the phrase also known as and instead repeatedly said "also knowing as." That's just my opinion.


This is the Reflecting Pool. The bottom half of the frame is water.
(Click to make any of the pictures bigger and get a better view.)

The Frozen Waterfall

Nature's lampshade


The story about this is that a little boy was bouncing this ball in the cathedral room and got it stuck up there. They left it there because they didn't want to damage the formation while extracting it. I later tried to figure out if this was true or just a story that the tour guides made up like they do in The Capitol, but I couldn't because their website sucks.

Edited to add: I guess have to take back what I wrote about the website sucking. When I wrote this, I just kept getting an "under construction" placeholder. Today the link goes to a rather nice website. But there's still nothing about the ball.

The bottom half of this photo is not water despite it's appearance.
These are actually stalactites and stalagmites.