Our plan for today was a trip to the Blue Ridge mountains. Hence we had been watching the weather forecast, which waivered between cloudy and wet but never actually mentioned FOG!
At the first overlook, where it is normally possible to see the Shenandoah Valley laid out with mountain ranges as far as the eye can see and the river winding through the valley like a ribbon, we could see only clouds..
The visitor centre looked positively eerie but we visited and listened to a very interesting talk by a park ranger about encounters with black bears that we were clearly never going to be able to see.
After a quick photo call to prove that we were there, we crawled along to the nearest entrance station (a very slow 30 miles) and headed into the fog-free but cloudy Shenandoah Valley. We had heard about the town of Luray and the caverns there and decided to have a look.
Well I think that it is fair to say that we were not disappointed! At the start of our tour we were told that these are the largest caverns in the eastern US and that we would be walking over a mile through the caves and tunnels and more than 160 feet underground. Some of the tunnels were barely head height, the largest caverns must have been 50-60ft tall.
It is very hard to convey in a few photos just how huge (but with tiny details), colourful, diverse and just spectacular these caverns are.
In this chamber more than 500 couples have married and there is an electric organ which 'plays' the stalactites.
The most mesmerizing part of the tour was the lake which was very calm and held an amazing reflection of the stalactites above..
So, although we were disappointed not to be able to share the beauty of Skyline Drive, it was a great find!
That's a shame about the Skyline drive but looks like you made a good find.
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