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Our kids have always wanted to visit a cave since their Octonauts lovin' days. What better cave to visit than Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system known in the world. There are many different park tours, but we bought the Historic Tour ($20 for adults, $15 for kids ages 6 to 12, and free for kids 5 and under). We've been stalking tickets for weeks now as we're usually last minute travelers and don't like to purchase tickets in advance, but the Historic Tour tickets on a Saturday always sold out (usually 2 to 3 days in advance) so we did purchase them on Wednesday.  

After a short introduction and talk on safety from our tour guide, we descended into the cave. What surprised me was how quickly we could feel the change in temperature, it was as if an air conditioning unit was blowing cold air at us. While we didn't immediately need our light jackets, the further into the cave we got, the colder it got eventually to around 54°F (compared to 82°F above the cave).
 

Walking into the cave, you can really understand and appreciate why it's called Mammoth Cave by its sheer size. Once in the cave, we learned about the different kind of rocks in the cave, including limestone (sedimentary rock), shale (wet swampy clays and muds that are compressed over a long period of time), and sandstone (tiny particles of sand, minerals, weathered rocks, and organic materials compressed together tightly) along with some history and on how the cave was formed.




One interesting thing we learned was that saltpetre was mined in the cave. Saltpetre was a principal ingredient in black gunpowder and was sold to the DuPont Company. When our kids heard DuPont, they remembered how we got to visit E. I. du Pont's, the founder of the DuPont company, family home in Delaware.


We saw a couple of pits including "The Bottomless Pit" which does actually have a bottom, and we went through Fat Man's Misery, a winding, slippery, narrow passageway.



We eventually descended over 300 feet below the surface, and then climbed many, many stairs back up to the same entrance we came through. 😅




The kids were a little disappointed that we didn't get to see any bats in the cave, but we did see some at the visitor center. 


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