Virginia Trip - Day 1

It's Finn's spring break from April 10 - 17, so Jojo and I took the week off as well. We left just after 6am on Monday, April 13, to drive down to Virginia. Our main purpose is to see the Luray Caverns. We were still on the road around noon and was getting hungry so we looked for a place to eat. We saw this sign that said Skyline Caverns and it included "food" so we decided to stop by. Well, their only food were chips and such, not "real" food. But I still had a lot of onigiri in the car that we could eat for lunch so no need to worry. And since we were already there, and the guy said that the tour was about to start, we thought we'd join the Skyline Caverns tour.

This is our first family trip to a cavern so we were in awe of the formations. Touching is prohibited although there was one fallen stalactite that we could touch and you could definitely see the result of years of people handling it - it was colored brown. Fairyland Lake was very interesting. It's a reflection pool so you can see the formations on the ceiling by looking at the water which acted as a mirror. There was also a beautiful formation that they called The Eagle because it did look like an eagle with it's wings spread (^_^)

Aside from these formations, Skyline Caverns had something special called Anthodites. These are only found in a few locations around the world and grows only one inch every 7,000 years! And the biggest one there was 18 inches meaning it took 126,000 years to grow that long! They remind me of sea urchins but they said they are also known as Orchids of the Mineral Kingdom. Don't really see the resemblance to an orchid though ... do you?

We were able to descend up to 240 feet and the tour lasted about an hour. After the tour, we drove to the hotel, checked-in, ate onigiri and went to The Garden Maze. This is our 2nd maze, the 1st one being the Pineapple maze in Hawaii. They had something in common - both had goals you had to find in the maze. We were given a mission card that needed to be stamped whenever we find a goal. There were 4 in total and when you find all of them, you get a discount on certain items at the gift shop. It makes going through the maze much more fun (^_^) Of course we found all of the goals but we didn't buy any of the discounted items ... hehehe.

The maze is located beside Luray Caverns and we could have gone to see it then, but we left the videocam at the hotel. It was fine since I planned on going there on Tuesday anyway. We went to the gift shop by the cavern anyway, bought souvenirs and fudge (mmmm). Then we went to the Singing Tower to take pictures. It's a carillon of 47 bells but unfortunately, it only perfoms on weekends so we didn't get to hear it.

Then it started drizzling so we went back to our hotel before heading out for dinner. Good thing we decided to eat dinner early coz restaurants there close at 8pm. Shops close at 6pm. We ate at Artisan's Grill and was it good! I had the Bacon and Bleu Beef Tenderloin (so yummy!!!). Really, if you ever find yourself in Luray, this is the place to eat. They're closed on Tuesdays so we had to eat somewhere else the next day. But that's for another post. Right now, enjoy the photos of our first day (^_^)