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Feb. 26th, 2005 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickMinimal grocery update (smallish lunch out during today's field trip)
Old grocery budget: $1764.78
Amount spent: $5.28
New grocery budget: $1759.50
Today's field trip involved four states, one television show, something I learned from Caligula, proper classical music for caves, and lots of questions I did not ask. There are also a few pictures in the review.
The four states were Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia, all of which I did some driving in as I went to Front Royal, Virginia, to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
en_ki and Annie, whom I did not know, for lunch and an outing of some sort. I rather thought that maybe Front Royal was where the Old Dominion ride was held. It, er, is. See here for more details on that. Anyway, I went to meet internet friends. I didn't get killed or sexually molested, though any younger readers out there (who are no doubt happily reading the entries on yaoi bondage porn and Caligula and so forth) should not take this to mean that all internet friends are harmless.
Anyway. We were going to go drive on Skyline Drive (the same one that was on the X-Files -- this is the television show part) and pull over somewhere and hike but it was closed due to snow and ice, which there wasn't any of on the road that we could see. Hrm. That was a bit of a disappointment.
As a backup plan, we visited Luray Caverns, which was a delightful experience unmarred by either snow or ice. It's about twenty miles from Front Royal, right down the road, with lots and lots of good signage. You can't miss it. This is not a free thing-to-do (neither is Skyline Drive, which wants ten bucks per car), but at eighteen dollars a head for grownups (they take Mastercard), it is still worth the price of admission and then some.
Our tour guide was a young woman, maybe college age, who was from the area. She was as fond of auxiliary verbs as a Baptist hellfire-and-brimstone preacher (And it was strange, that he DID feel cool air, for it was a hot day...). She also used the construct would of gave which I found entirely too entertaining. I am, perhaps, easily amused. Anyway, she did a respectable job with the tour schpiel and she didn't sound overly amusement-park-ish about something she probably said eight times a day. The tour took about an hour, so she'd be giving the talk seven or eight times a day, depending on foot traffic. In taking the tour, you walk about a mile and a quarter, and there are some stairs. It's not horrible, and there were lots of breaks where we stopped so that the tour guide could talk to us some more.
The cave itself was pretty well-lit, with inexpertly-disguised lighting fixtures shining lights on the parts of the cave that someone thought were interesting. There were other, also-interesting cave features that weren't nearly as well-lit... but they were more subtle. The lighting crew for Luray went for the obviously interesting stuff. As a result of the cave wiring project, there's a lot of wiring (covered with fake rock stuff) and a number of switches for the lights along the walkway, but I didn't play with anything because I figured that would probably be a bad idea. The cave also had several picnic-chest first-aid supply storage locations tucked in dimly-lit areas where they would probably not be noticed by tour-takers. Nice to know that they had our safety in mind.
Despite the fact that a whole crew of someones crawled through the cave, enlarging the passageway, laying a brick walkway, cutting steps, pouring and grooving concrete ramps, installing and wiring lighting for the interesting parts, putting in railings, and otherwise mauling the pristine-ness of things, tourtakers are told NO TOUCHIE THE ROCKS!! I am please to report that I did not touch any of the rocks at all even though I wanted to. This is probably a sign of incipient adulthood on my part, to be able to resist touching the rocks after I've been told not to touch them.
One of the features of the cave is that it has a lake, or a pond, that reflects the ceiling. This is pretty damn cool. It's a great visual. I didn't take a picture of that. There are also lots of formations in the cave with names and shit but to find out what those were, I would have had to pay more attention to the tour guide and I was too busy doing other things to attend to the tour guide. The tour guide, when pointing out these features, used a regular flashlight. It would have been a lot nicer if she had used a green or red laser pointer, configured with the bar display instead of a dot. That would have been a lot easier to see than searching for the marginally brighter flashlight wobbling around. I may well email them and tell them that, so that they can improve their presentation of the cave.
Also, many years ago, some person by name of Sprinkler (not making this up) turned part of the cave into an organ. (Please do not laugh. I'm serious, here.) In the process of tuning the organ, Mr. Sprinkler TOUCHIED THE ROCKS and sawed bits of them off. Probably he had a special dispensation. At any rate, the cave organ plays A Mighty Fortress which is a hymn. I only know this because... because... because I'm an informed atheist and because we had to stand there while it played. I was hoping for Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor (midi file here in case you're not up on your classical organ music but if you only know one piece of classical organ music, it's probably this one.) because that'd go great with a cave, all thematic and stuff, but no. No. We got A Mighty Fortress instead.
Here are some pictures I took, with commentary:
I'm as much a fan of STC as I am of any other singsong poet besides Emily Yellow Rose of Texas Dickinson. However, if you're going to imply that your caverns are a stately pleasure dome, I expect there to be lovely naked brownskinned boys in them. Also possibly opium. Luray Caverns, delightful though they were, did not have either lovely naked brownskinned boys OR opiates of any sort except possibly in the medical supply chests that I didn't mess with because of the NO TOUCHIE rule. Also, there was no river. There was a smallish stream going into the neat reflecting lake thing, but that was NOT a river. I thought this was a somewhat misleading sign.
This was a rock thing. I thought it was pretty. There were many pretty rock things, but this one came out really well in my picture of it.
This is a rock thing that I think looks a lot like mushroom gills. Click here to see which mushroom I was thinking of.
This is the only plant life besides algae that we saw inside the cave. It is a fern. It is making sweet, sweet love to the halogen lamp. The staff says nobody has yet had the heart to pull it out. I found this reassuring for some reason.
This is a pseudo-caveman and his woman. We can tell it's a pseudo-caveman because of the amount of clothing these people are wearing. See, I recently saw Caligula (the movie) and noted the acute clothing shortage in ancient Rome. If there were no clothes in ancient Rome, there certainly wouldn't have been any back in cavepeople times. Progress marches ever onward, you know.
Questions I did not ask:
How much money does the Luray Caverns Corporation make in a year?
Do you get healthcare coverage as part of your compensation package for being a tour guide?
How many lights are in the cave?
Who decided what things to light?
Are there any fish in the water?
Can I see a wiring diagram of the lights?
How many times a day do you give the tour?
What do all the lights do to the cave ecology? (I was very interested in the lights. The lights defined the cave space as clearly as did the walkways and the railings and such. The lights censored the cave experience. For me, a great deal of the tour was about the lights.)
Old grocery budget: $1764.78
Amount spent: $5.28
New grocery budget: $1759.50
Today's field trip involved four states, one television show, something I learned from Caligula, proper classical music for caves, and lots of questions I did not ask. There are also a few pictures in the review.
The four states were Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia, all of which I did some driving in as I went to Front Royal, Virginia, to meet
en_ki and Annie, whom I did not know, for lunch and an outing of some sort. I rather thought that maybe Front Royal was where the Old Dominion ride was held. It, er, is. See here for more details on that. Anyway, I went to meet internet friends. I didn't get killed or sexually molested, though any younger readers out there (who are no doubt happily reading the entries on yaoi bondage porn and Caligula and so forth) should not take this to mean that all internet friends are harmless. Anyway. We were going to go drive on Skyline Drive (the same one that was on the X-Files -- this is the television show part) and pull over somewhere and hike but it was closed due to snow and ice, which there wasn't any of on the road that we could see. Hrm. That was a bit of a disappointment.
As a backup plan, we visited Luray Caverns, which was a delightful experience unmarred by either snow or ice. It's about twenty miles from Front Royal, right down the road, with lots and lots of good signage. You can't miss it. This is not a free thing-to-do (neither is Skyline Drive, which wants ten bucks per car), but at eighteen dollars a head for grownups (they take Mastercard), it is still worth the price of admission and then some.
Our tour guide was a young woman, maybe college age, who was from the area. She was as fond of auxiliary verbs as a Baptist hellfire-and-brimstone preacher (And it was strange, that he DID feel cool air, for it was a hot day...). She also used the construct would of gave which I found entirely too entertaining. I am, perhaps, easily amused. Anyway, she did a respectable job with the tour schpiel and she didn't sound overly amusement-park-ish about something she probably said eight times a day. The tour took about an hour, so she'd be giving the talk seven or eight times a day, depending on foot traffic. In taking the tour, you walk about a mile and a quarter, and there are some stairs. It's not horrible, and there were lots of breaks where we stopped so that the tour guide could talk to us some more.
The cave itself was pretty well-lit, with inexpertly-disguised lighting fixtures shining lights on the parts of the cave that someone thought were interesting. There were other, also-interesting cave features that weren't nearly as well-lit... but they were more subtle. The lighting crew for Luray went for the obviously interesting stuff. As a result of the cave wiring project, there's a lot of wiring (covered with fake rock stuff) and a number of switches for the lights along the walkway, but I didn't play with anything because I figured that would probably be a bad idea. The cave also had several picnic-chest first-aid supply storage locations tucked in dimly-lit areas where they would probably not be noticed by tour-takers. Nice to know that they had our safety in mind.
Despite the fact that a whole crew of someones crawled through the cave, enlarging the passageway, laying a brick walkway, cutting steps, pouring and grooving concrete ramps, installing and wiring lighting for the interesting parts, putting in railings, and otherwise mauling the pristine-ness of things, tourtakers are told NO TOUCHIE THE ROCKS!! I am please to report that I did not touch any of the rocks at all even though I wanted to. This is probably a sign of incipient adulthood on my part, to be able to resist touching the rocks after I've been told not to touch them.
One of the features of the cave is that it has a lake, or a pond, that reflects the ceiling. This is pretty damn cool. It's a great visual. I didn't take a picture of that. There are also lots of formations in the cave with names and shit but to find out what those were, I would have had to pay more attention to the tour guide and I was too busy doing other things to attend to the tour guide. The tour guide, when pointing out these features, used a regular flashlight. It would have been a lot nicer if she had used a green or red laser pointer, configured with the bar display instead of a dot. That would have been a lot easier to see than searching for the marginally brighter flashlight wobbling around. I may well email them and tell them that, so that they can improve their presentation of the cave.
Also, many years ago, some person by name of Sprinkler (not making this up) turned part of the cave into an organ. (Please do not laugh. I'm serious, here.) In the process of tuning the organ, Mr. Sprinkler TOUCHIED THE ROCKS and sawed bits of them off. Probably he had a special dispensation. At any rate, the cave organ plays A Mighty Fortress which is a hymn. I only know this because... because... because I'm an informed atheist and because we had to stand there while it played. I was hoping for Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor (midi file here in case you're not up on your classical organ music but if you only know one piece of classical organ music, it's probably this one.) because that'd go great with a cave, all thematic and stuff, but no. No. We got A Mighty Fortress instead.
Here are some pictures I took, with commentary:
I'm as much a fan of STC as I am of any other singsong poet besides Emily Yellow Rose of Texas Dickinson. However, if you're going to imply that your caverns are a stately pleasure dome, I expect there to be lovely naked brownskinned boys in them. Also possibly opium. Luray Caverns, delightful though they were, did not have either lovely naked brownskinned boys OR opiates of any sort except possibly in the medical supply chests that I didn't mess with because of the NO TOUCHIE rule. Also, there was no river. There was a smallish stream going into the neat reflecting lake thing, but that was NOT a river. I thought this was a somewhat misleading sign.This was a rock thing. I thought it was pretty. There were many pretty rock things, but this one came out really well in my picture of it.This is a rock thing that I think looks a lot like mushroom gills. Click here to see which mushroom I was thinking of.This is the only plant life besides algae that we saw inside the cave. It is a fern. It is making sweet, sweet love to the halogen lamp. The staff says nobody has yet had the heart to pull it out. I found this reassuring for some reason.This is a pseudo-caveman and his woman. We can tell it's a pseudo-caveman because of the amount of clothing these people are wearing. See, I recently saw Caligula (the movie) and noted the acute clothing shortage in ancient Rome. If there were no clothes in ancient Rome, there certainly wouldn't have been any back in cavepeople times. Progress marches ever onward, you know. Questions I did not ask:
How much money does the Luray Caverns Corporation make in a year?
Do you get healthcare coverage as part of your compensation package for being a tour guide?
How many lights are in the cave?
Who decided what things to light?
Are there any fish in the water?
Can I see a wiring diagram of the lights?
How many times a day do you give the tour?
What do all the lights do to the cave ecology? (I was very interested in the lights. The lights defined the cave space as clearly as did the walkways and the railings and such. The lights censored the cave experience. For me, a great deal of the tour was about the lights.)
