May 26…. What a day!

Slept late. Woke up to Susanne and my birthday present from her.

I’ve had a partial set of children’s books since I was quite young, inherited from family.

Bomba The Jungle Boy, by Roy Rockwood.

Kinda along the lines of Tarzan, the adventures of a young boy lost in the Amazon jungle, raised by natives and the animals.

I only ever had six of the eight books, so Susy found me the remaining ones to fill out my set. The correct publishing run, and in perfect condition to match the ones I already have. She is so awesome!

Later this afternoon, we headed to Mammoth Cave for our first tour.

Mammoth Cave is the longest cave in the world, with over 450 miles of mapped passages, and with more being crawled through and mapped all the time.

We went on the Gothic Avenue tour. About 2 miles in and out, the tour focuses on some of the history of the cave, with a highlight on Gothic Avenue, a side passage from the main tunnel.

Walking in through the historic entrance, a wide passage heads down hill into the ground and reaches a large room called The Rotunda.

Inside the Rotunda, there remains evidence of a period in the cave’s history when it was used as a saltpeter mine to supply the gunpowder industry during the War of 1812. Leaching pits and mud boxes are dotted around the room and further down the passage.

Continuing downwards, we reached a set of steps leading up and over a small rise and then into Gothic Avenue. Oddly, Mammoth Cave is quite dry, due to the geology and topography of the world on the surface above it. Long oval shaped passages winding and snaking through the underground, but generally bare of formations. Gothic Avenue is one of the places in the cave that has the traditional cave formations. Stalactites, stalagmites, columns. Soda straws. This made it a prime place to bring early tourists, and this led to the ceiling of the passage being just covered with antique graffiti. Cave visitors used candles and torches to smoke their names into the ceiling. Hundreds. Thousands of names. Big ones, little ones, legible and not so much. We saw dates spanning the early days of tourist exploration around 1815 up into the 1830’s and 1840’s.

Reaching the end of Gothic Avenue, we turned and headed back towards the surface. On the way in, the ranger had showed us names scratched in the sides of the tunnel dating from the 1960’s. Vandalism, he called them. Hmmmm. I get that, but at what point does vandalism turn into history??? I asked that question and his answer was “about 1941”.

Again, hmmmm. In a hundred years, will graffiti from 1960 just be the next batch of names from history??