Mammoth Sign We actually took this picture on our way out of the park, but it proves we were there. And that it's not just a national park, it's an international biosphere reserve, too. And it weirds me out that I look like I have only four fingers.

For dinner that day Katie cooked Claire and I a spaghetti dinner at Kirt's apartment, and then that evening we drove up to Franklin, Kentucky. The plan was to get within an hour of Mammoth Cave and visit it in the morning, thus giving us time to get to Bloomington at a reasonable hour. This worked fine, although we ran into a temporary snag when the Super 8 at which we had made reservations...didn't have our reservations. The situation was resolved short of our getting stuck at 10:30 in Kentucky with no hotel when the manager gave us his sons' study room, which was a regular hotel room, only with all his sons' stuff in it. The staff remade the beds and cleaned, but the underwear hanging on the back of the bathroom door—apparently overlooked—was a homey touch. Riiiight.

The next morning, happy to be away from Franklin, we toured Mammoth Cave. Claire had never been there, despite being a geology major and despite having driven right past it on a geology field trip. It's conveniently located just off I-65 so we had no choice but to stop. The tour we took was the Frozen Niagra, which I like because it takes visitors through different cave environments.

You enter through a manmade entrance and descend, via a narrow stainless steel stairways (created, of course, by millions of years of water dripping through layers of limestone) through a network of pits and domes. Since it had rained a lot recently—we drove past several swollen rivers and submerged pastures—it was very wet in that part of the cave as water dripped in from the suface. The middle part of the tour goes through large, dry rooms littered with large fallen blocks of rock, left over from when water flowed horizontally through that part of the cave. And the final stage, from which the tour gets its name, goes past many formations that looked to someone like a frozen version of Niagra Falls.

After the tour we walked over to the historic entrance, which is a huge opening, cavernous even, that is not manmade. But it was closed (the park put in gates), so we couldn't stick our heads in. It doesn't have any formations there, but it's very, very big, and there used to be a little walk that took you past signs telling you how saltpeter was made there during the War of 1812. And after that, we were cold from being outside, and we went back to the car for lunch and went on to Indiana.

Sinkhole The Frozen Niagra entrance (a door in the side of the hill) is at the bottom of a sinkhole. Looking up you can see how steep it is.

Futility It's extremely hard to take good pictures in a cave. But it's fun, and everyone wants to try anyway. So I took a bad picture of Claire taking a picture. Note the steel stairway. And how narrow a space it is.

The Flash Works Here are some random cave formations taken on the last third of the tour.

Cave People Towards the end, we had the option to enter the Drapery Room, a sunken area that contains many formations. Here you can see some of the formations and some of the people looking at the formations.

More Cave People and the Drapery This large dome-shaped thing seems to be the drapery that gives the area the name. From the top of the stairs, you can see (again) the formations and some of the people looking at the formations.

All-Natural The exit from the Frozen Niagra tour is also manmade, so you get the amusing effect of people filing out from a metal door in the side of a wooded hill.

Historic Path This is the walkway to the historic entrance.

Hole in the Wall The actual historic entrance is so large it's hard to get in one shot. Note the ice hanging from the upper lip of the cave.

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