Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. ~George Eliot

Last week Martha, another inspector’s wife, and I, rode up the mountains to Laurel Caverns.  Laurel Caverns is Pennsylvania's largest cave, with 2.8 miles of passages.  It is the sixteenth longest developed cave in the United States. Formerly called Dulaney's Cave and originally called Laurel Hill Cave.  It has been explored since the late 1700's, and was a lair in the olden days for Indians and robber gangs.

Outside the caverns. You go inside this building to go down into the cavern.

Our guide, Garrett. He was very knowledgeable about the cave and very funny.

Spooky!

 

Bats can be found in the cavern.  This time of year they are starting to hibernate.

A single small brown bat, can eat up to 1,000 insects an hour, and is one of the worlds longest living mammals, for its size, with life spans of almost forty years.

Most bats give birth to only a single pup each year, making them very vulnerable to extinction.  They are the slowest reproducing animals on earth for their size.

 

The steep slope of some passageways causes an interesting optical illusion known as a gravity hill. The brain is confused and tends to underestimate the slope. A demonstration in which a ball appears to roll uphill illustrates this.

 

 

  

  

The cave was a bit tight in some places, but not too bad.

Fall colors abound.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We rode up to Ohiopyle.  I love this photo of a man fishing.

I won this beautiful bracelet this week from Fantasy Jewelry Box

I also won four bottles of Girard’s salad dressing.  It’s some of the best salad dressing I’ve ever tasted.

I love their spinach dressing for spinach salads and their champagne dressing for anything else.

I finally finished Jim Butcher’s Dresden’s series, twelve books, whew.  This was a great series, and the last book left you with a heck of a cliffhanger.  I can’t wait until the next book.

Now I’m reading Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series.  So far I’m not impressed with the story, but sometimes a series starts out slow and then takes off.  I’ll give it a couple more books before giving up.