Last week I took my son a short vacation to the North Carolina Mountains to celebrate the end of a great school year.  Our first destination was Linville Caverns.  It is approximately a 3 hour drive with a food stop from the Triad. It is tucked back away from any real city area, so you really do feel like you are deep in the mountains.

There was hardly anyone there with it being the middle of the week, so we got a tour all to ourselves.  The tour guide was informative, funny, and tried to engage my 7 year old in conversation as much as he could.

The caverns are one of only two places in the world that you can truly be without light.  You are after all in the middle of the inside of a mountain.  It is 52 degrees all the time inside the caverns, and thankfully we knew this and brought jackets.  At one point they turned off all the lights so we could experience what the total darkness was like.  Pretty spooky!  People used to hide out in those caverns, but I can’t  imagine!

There are some incredible and ancient rock formations with many different colors.  They had named a lot of the rocks for what they looked like, and even had us make up our own names for some of them-my son loved that!

There is a creek that runs through the inside with some fish in it.  We squeezed through a tight walkway over a metal bridge where you could see the lower level of the cavern, which is a pool that is so still and deep you would think it was glass.

My son wants to go back when the bats are there-lucky me!

Our next leg in this journey took us to the Blue Ridge Parkway….to be continued…