Winter Road Trip Day 3: Marengo Cave And On the Road From Cincinnati OH to Lebanon MO

We said goodbye to our friends in Cincinnati and headed into Kentucky, passing through Florence (which proudly proclaims "Florence, Y'All!" in huge lettering on a roadside water tower) and then Louisville before crossing the Ohio River into Indiana.

Around lunchtime, we decided some tourism was in order, so we followed billboards to the exit for Marengo Caves and stopped in at a local tourism office, where a very nice lady filled us in on some information about the cave tour and gave us a suggestion for a local diner to have lunch at.

Marengo Cave is located in Marengo IN, and is a designated US National Landmark.

 The cave was discovered in 1883 by two schoolchildren, a sister and brother named Blanche and Orris Hiestand. The owner of the land saw the commercial potential of the discovery, and the cave has been preserved and remained open to visitors since its discovery.

There are two tours available. We took the shorter "Crystal Palace" tour. We descended a staircase from the visitors center with our guide and the rest of the tour group and entered a long chamber of shallow pools that reflected the cave formation in the electric lighting that had been installed in the cave.

The lower sections of the photo are a reflection, giving the appearance of a second, lower level of the cave.

Here are some of the formations in the first chamber we viewed.

Gynn was using her old Argus camera to take some photographs.

The ceiling of the first chamber was flat with little stalactites where water seeped through the limestone.

In the areas where water flowed through the cave, the limestone would collect into dam-like formations.

We continued along a path while our guide pointed out different types of structures like stalactites and stalagmites (stalactites hang down from the top: "t" for top; stalagmites rise up from the floor: you "mite" trip over one!).

When they meet, they can form columns.

Here's a closeup of a stalactite:

Other formations include different types of draperies and flowstone.

Here is a massive column.

And an unusual stalagmite.

The "Blowing Bat Crawl" is one of the many crawlways leading to other chambers of the cave that are not part of the normal tour, but can be viewed on special expeditions that involve crawling and wading.

 The highlight of this tour is the "Crystal Palace" chamber, with its "Pipe Organ" formation of thin stalactites. The Crystal Palace is set up as a theater where a short presentation is projected onto the wall. The green you see is the light from the projector.

This massive formation is located at the back of the Crystal Palace:

After finishing the tour and buying a few souveniers, we had lunch in Marengo and got back on the road.

The plan originally had been to get to Tulsa, but we had gotten a later start than we'd planned and we took a while at Marengo Cave.

The weather also turned bad on us. It started snowing while we were in Marengo, and we were traveling through a nasty "wintery mix" when we reached St. Louis. The famous Arch took on a mystical appearance as the top of it was lost in the fog when we drove past on the freeway.

We had some difficulty finding a place to eat dinner, but ended up having a good meal at a Flying J truckstop somewhere south of St. Louis. We were both tired from the driving and the weather conditions kept slowing us down, so we stopped for the night in Lebanon MO, a bit north of Springfield, knowing we would have do put in a lot of miles the next day if we were going to make it to the hotel room we'd reserved in Holbrook AZ.