First we went to the Moaning cavern. There's actually an official web page for these caves at www.caverntours.com.. Moaning was very cool as it was mostly vertical and involved a spiral staircase some 165 feet tall.. They have an alternate route there where you can repel down for $40 vs $9 for the foot tour. Since I've repelled a lot in the past it wasn't really worth it to me so we walked..

left - this is the entrance at the surface if you take the repelling route..It's also the route a lot of animals and people fell into and died after finding what appeared to be an innocent hole in the ground.. Coincidence it's now the repelling route?
left middle - This is the route you take when you repel down. I took it from the spiral staircase.
right middle - the 165ft stairway you take down. It's constructed of old battleship metal.. Who carried all this from the coast anyhow?
right - See the rope going down into darkness? This is where you'd go if you took the adventure route where you put on coveralls and a helmet with a light attached to it. Ahhh.. next time..

left - A big glob looking thing.. It was huge.. (stalagmite)
middle - wondering if Kevin is ever going to press the shutter button.. :-)
right - taken at the top of the stairs. the ONLY shot I managed to take (out of about 10) where Kevin *actually* managed to hold his eyes open for the shot. I'll spare him by not putting up the others ;-)

left - Top of the stairs..
middle - part of the path up towards the top of the whole cavern.
right - more of the same path..

Next stop, we rushed over to the California Cavern to see if we could sneak in before 5pm. Somehow we arrived right at 4:45pm when the last tour was leaving and hopped on. Amazing timing we had all day with both cave tours. At both places we arrived, paid, and a tour was leaving. I knew it would work that way though.. no really I did!

Anyways this particular cavern was more horizontal in nature. Much like you might expect, the entrance is in a side of a hill and you basically go into the hill and somewhat downward. Much different then Moaning where you essentially go straight down.

left - The entrance to the cavern. This is also where you are issued 1 standard ACME white skullcap
left middle - Just a section of the trail where I had to duck through
right middle - stalactites on the ceiling. Many are broken..
right - I forget what they call this. It looked strange though and was almost see-through.

left - more ceiling stuff.. and you thought you weren't going to see any cool cavern-stuff eh?
left middle - even more ceiling stuff. Kinda gross isn't it? Bet you were wishing by now you hadn't hoped I would take some neat pictures of the caves eh?
right middle - we had to squeeze through this narrow area. I told Kev to turn around real quick and well here he is. Amazingly I think his eyes are open. No wait.. my mistake they aren't..(betcha thought I wasn't going to put one of these up eh Kev?) Incidentally it was right about now that I realized it wasn't the brightest idea in the world to wear white when going on cave tours. Yes we got somewhat dirty by the time it was all done. I don't feel too bad though because Kevin had been in the cave before and he wore white anyways.
right - had to get at least one shot of me in the cave..

Whelp there it is.. All in all a very cool trip. I'd definitely like to go back and take the adventure tour and go deeper next time.