Date: 2003-07-29
From: Luray, Va.

To: Luray, Va.
Miles today: 0.0

start Luray,Va.destination Luray ,Va.It is celebration time for us. We decide to take a zero day and play the tourist, complete with cameras, sunglasses and fat wallets. Well, maybe not so fat wallets. But we do play the tourist. The first order of zero hiking was to sleep late. How nice to get up at 9:00am. We ate a grand breakfast at the hotel. Enough to get us down the road to Luray Caverns. This is Mudbutt's first cavern tour. It is my 8 or 9th one. Each time I am fasinated by the stalatites and stalagmites. To think these are created by water funneling down through the earth to the caves below. Our tour guide is a young high school student. His braces give him a hard to understand accent, coupled with a wad of gum he had, and a crying baby in our group, it was next to impossible to understand all that he said. Since I knew what he was going to say anyway, all these caverns are formed the same way, I was able to just wander in the back of the group and take in the sights. The temperature stays a cool 54 degrees. Stratigically placed spotlights lend an eerie feeling to the caverns. My favorite place in the caverns was where the floor is actually covered with 12 to 18 inches of water. It refects a perfect reflection of the ceiling above it. It takes a while to realize you are looking at a refection. The water is clear as glass, and not a ripple of any kind in it. Our tour was 1 1/4 miles long and we were down under the earth 150 feet. The stalatites were used as pipes to convey the sound of an organ in the cathedral room. It was an awesome sound. Of course our tour ended at the gift shop entrance. They made very little money off of us though. We just didn't find anything we wanted bad enough to carry it with us. Our next stop was the Garden Maze. This was a first for me and something I have been wanting to do for sometime. Mudbutt and I wandered around and around, running into dead ends almost constantly. There were plenty of laughs as we kept seeing the same people over and over again. The maze is made from 8 ft.cedar trees, all planted along a fence that formed the walls of the maze. Water misters kept everyone cool while they were trying to find their way out. There were a couple of times the frustrated voice of a parent would be heard. A cool lemonade and a pretzel both at highly inflated prices refreshed us enough to finish the maze and walk to Wal-Mart. We bonked however after we did our grocery shopping. We sat outside on a bench until we found an unsuspecting victim to give us a ride back to the motel. In our defense though, we did try to call a cab, only to find they were out of business. A trip to the library to check on hiker friends ahead of us and dinner put us in the mood to see yet another movie, Spy Kids 3. It is probably great for kids. What can I say? A frosty from Tastee Freeze on the way back to the motel was the icing on the cake for us. I did find out that Subman, one of Pack 3/1 hikers sumitted Katahdin yesterday. I am so excited for him! He is the first person that I have met, that has hiked the trail. Everyone I know who has hiked the trail, I met after their hike. That probably doesn't make any sense to most of you, but it some how gives me encouragement, and more determination to finish. It puts the reality of this thru hike on a much more personal level. Tomorrow we are aqua blazing 28 miles on the Shenandoah River. It will be an overnight trip for us. I am looking forward to that!