Day 204: Luray Caverns

This week Cousin Howie is in town from Las Vegas, which is always a nice treat.  We decided to head out towards the Shenandoah Valley so we could take in a few of the sites.  We toured along Skyline Drive (and added a few more stamps to Michal's National Parks Passport), and stopped for a while at Luray Caverns.  


Hundreds of millions of years old, these caverns contain beautiful formations of stalactites and stalagmites that were too gorgeous for my camera to capture.  Well, more accurately, I am still discovering how to use the various features of the camera, and this posed more of a challenge than I was able to conquer.  I always have the option to go auto pilot and let the camera do the thinking for me, which normally involves the inclusion of flash.  That doesn't work so well deep within the earth.  I attempted to utilize some of the manual features, fiddling with the light settings, ISO (whatever THAT is), etc., but still the snapshots were a horribly poor rendering of what we saw. 


While I continuously attempted to capture at least one acceptable photograph from our visit, Michal looked up, around, and all over.  Since many of the more impressive formations are strategically illuminated, it was a light show that continued to capture her glances.  She also wanted to touch everything.  Silly baby.


Here is one of the half-decent photos from the caverns:

This totally came out more "Fortress of Solitude" than it really is.  What looks like a bridge of fallen rock is a stalactite that crashed to the cavern floor over three million years ago (maybe three thousand - I cannot recall exactly what he said, I just remembered it was long enough that I probably did not need to worry about it happening today).  Pretty impressive.