Summary

Description

Lisa and I are back home safe and sound from our trip to Virginia and parts underground this weekend. We had a fabulous time! We are sore from all the walking and climbing and crawling while in the cave for 7 hours (!) on Saturday. We both did very well, and we had a fun time with the other Triangle Troglodytes.

There were 12 people total, and we split into two groups of 6 to go through the cave. It had many levels and many miles of passages. We only went through a fraction of the cave, but we did traverse about 200-300' of vertical, starting from the entrance which was a few hundred feet up a hill, down to the stream at the bottom of the cave (and eventually back up to the entrance which is also the exit). We waded through the stream a bit as well. It was ankle to shin deep and pretty chilly. The knock-off army jungle boots Lisa and I bought on Friday held up pretty well, and our wool socks kept our feet warm even though they were wet. All of the moving around combined with the layers we were wearing kept us pretty warm. At one "end" of the stream, there was a water fall. Literally, water falling from the "ceiling" about 80' above. It was neat. At the other "end" of the stream, there were some beautiful formations: flow stone, soda straws, curtains (aka cave bacon). Most of them were whitish. A few tinges of color, but nothing too dramatic. (The formations were dramatic enough on their own.)

Oh, and there were little bats throughout the cave, hanging from the ceilings and walls. Not lots of them clustered together, but a few obvious ones in each of the rooms we went through. They were really cute. A few times they flew. (I never saw one take off, but I assume we disturbed them.)

We took 2 disposable cameras with us, so out of the 54 shots we took, hopefully a few of them will come out. We'll have to get them developed and them hopefully scanned in.