Natural Bridge, Virginia

Today was very rainy, but was still a much better day than yesterday, thankfully. :O)

We worked quickly in the morning to get as much schooling done as we could (Spencer finished up his Core work for his third grade year!) so that we could take off and go see the Natural Bridge and Caverns and our combination tickets actually got us a couple bonus things too.

We realized last night that we accidentally left our last campground without returning the remote to the crazy little cable box that they'd checked out to us, so the first stop that we made was in the Natural Bridge Post Office to drop that into the mail.

It was really raining hard so we started our tour in the butterfly garden...didn't know we were going to get to see that, but I always love butterflies.

One of us picked up a little hitchhiker and had to be de-fluttered before he could leave. LOL

Creepy kid swinging on this rope high up took several second looks.

Next, it was still really raining pretty hard, so we went through the Wax Museum and Factory Tour, some place that we never would've bought a separate ticket for. The museum was pretty dated, but it was still neat to see some area history presented via different life-size dioramas with wax figures.

The factory tour was kind of a "how they do it". It was neat to see that they had created figures for all different kinds of places and museums all over the world. We learned it takes 2-3 months to create a figure from start to finish. The sculptor first creates a head from clay and 90% of those are sculpted from photos rather than live models. They then create an epoxy mold and a head or torso and matching hands are cast and then texturized (adding skin-like pores to smooth surface). The hair takes 2-3 weeks and is usually added one strand at a time. It takes a couple of weeks to build a custom body to match the head and hands. Sometimes a body is built to fit period clothing that has been provided.

We came right out of the wax museum and hopped on a shuttle which took us down to the bridge. It had pretty much stopped raining so the timing was perfect. The driver told us that he wasn't sure of the status of the full trail path (which goes back for over a mile and takes you to some falls) since there was a flash flood watch and water had been observed very near a low bridge spot on the trail. We told him we would proceed with caution. We started up the beginning of the trail and got our first glimpse of the bridge. It was impressively big.

The bridge is on land that was at one time owned by Thomas Jefferson and was surveyed by George Washington. There is a story that Washington climbed up and carved his initials in the rock. Also, it is rumored that at one time he threw a coin up to the top of the bridge (215 feet high).

We walked on down the trail to see a replica Monacan Indian village.

There, we saw the status of the rest of the trail.

The water was definitely high and muddy; it was really rushing, roiling and churning over rocks at some spots.

After the village, we headed back down the trail and enjoyed the break in the rain.

We decided not to ride the shuttle, but to walk back up the trail to get through the gift shop and into the Yukon so we could drive a little ways back up the hill to the caverns where we could take our tour.

I think this is what the creek water under the bridge would normally look
like if it weren't so churned up and muddy.

Before dying in 1980, this arbor vitae was, at 1600 years old, the
oldest and largest known in the world.

Loved the color and the water beading up on these leaves.

When we got up to the cavern gift shop, we were pleased to learn that we could get into the next tour which was leaving in 10 minutes. It was a small group too, just another family of 6 and one couple besides us.

It was a little sad to see so much moss growing in the cave because it saps the water and minerals
and stops the cave formations from growing.

Skylar looking for fire bellied salamander in the cave pool, but we didn't see any.

All in all, we enjoyed getting to see this cave, but didn't think it was as impressive as the others (Carlsbad Caverns, Jewel Cave) that we've seen on this trip.

We came back to the trailer and at a lunch/dinner combination meal and hung out doing our own things while Brock finished up his work day and I worked on getting some campground reservations for the next couple of weeks.