Spelunking in the hills

03/10/2008

Our intention today was to visit the Luray Caverns and Motor Museum. We crossed the mountains by Skyline Drive on the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Park (yes we know you all know the same songs as we do so feel free to sing them).

There are places out here that people have never really left and communities remain together which results in outsiders being a little unwelcome if you stumble onto one of them we were told. Thoughts of Deliverance sprang to mind and banjo playing people on porches. We never saw them but you would have to be way off track to come across them I guess. When the National Parks Service took over the land people were just moved off, whether you owned your farm or not and this obviously leads to a deep mistrust of the government for a lot of people.

Luray was beautiful and a local sound engineer had wired up various stalagtites to play certain notes controlled by an organ which was pretty eary. Needless to say, one wonders if he had enough to do in his life!! The motor museum was just as good with pristine coaches and then cars over a vast period of time. Most had original buying costs on them and were around $480 upwards. Imagine how rich you must have felt to have afforded a car back then.

We returned home and then investigated Culpeper to get the White Water Rafting pictures developed - hopefully these will be added soon.