There's a tourist trap a few miles down from my town called Crystal Cave and in the past 2 decades of living here, I'd somehow escaped visiting it until a few weekends ago. I've expressed before that the area of Pennsylvania I live in is filled with wide open farmland, rolling mountains, blue skies, Barthy Burgers, and girls, but it's still close to a lot of hot "night life" type spots, shopping, and a beach built by the US Army. People who are more interested in checking out the horse and buggies than they are in buying $5 Wrangler jeans tend to sway toward the side of visiting Crystal Cave.

I was expecting the entire place to be somewhat of a hole in the ground, but when I pulled up on a vast and well-filled parking lot my mindset changed. Many families were taking the windy roads through Kutztown to presumably get in one last trip before school starting. I just wanted to go someplace new, cheap, and where I could take lots of photos to fill my summer scrapbook. I think over the past two months I've spent $25 just on scrapbooking material from Dollar Tree alone, so you can imagine the devastation I've done at actual craft stores.



We nabbed some tickets for cave entry which included a "guided tour" and then proceeded to the ice cream parlor because it was hot, and ice cream is the world's greatest edible cooling agent. I can't say much about the ice cream parlor because they didn't even carry soft serve, and using your credit card was a 5 minute process that included making a phone call. Luckily we paid with cash, but the lady ahead of us with 4 kids was not so lucky. We started the trek to the entrance after that, which was pretty bad. You never really notice how badly out of shape you are until you're walking at a high incline in 90° weather with 7 year olds running past you.

Before getting into the cave we were subjected to a video which was more or less a powerpoint presentation a 15 year old made based off of an old movie reel. I appreciated the lack of zooming text with racecar sounds. After that it was into the actual cave which was cool (temperature wise) though some people were going a little overboard by practically donning Eskimo parkas. Confession time, I took mineralogy in high school and I think rocks and minerals are pretty neat, though I have horrible study habits so I probably couldn't tell pumice from basalt without trying to float them in water first.



The cave had a "no touch" rule which was quickly violated by every child in the lot leaving me to believe it's not a well enforced rule. Of course I flocked to the first phallic looking stone I found for a photo op. The tour was fairly thorough and even included a "lights out" portion that left everyone in pure darkness, scaring the shit out of the kids, but allowing optimum canoodling time for the adults. One structure was claimed to look like the Millennium Falcon but they totally missed that a few feet over there was a perfect Jabba the Hut.



After the tour we scoured the gift shop mooning over giant crystal balls, wind chimes, mood rings, and Native American paraphernalia. I can't see the average tourist oogling over scrying stones and crystal pendulums, but I bought my pendulum at an anime convention, so I have no room to talk. Myke and I decided to throw caution to the wind and buy a bag of dirt with surprise mystery gems inside.



Outside there's a long slough with many panning boxes tied on with chains similar to the ones that connect pens in banks. We were provided with a bag of dirt and an index card to identify any gems we find. After two sessions of sloshing around in the water we had a few decent sized chunks and a ton of tiny little pieces the size of mouse turds. It was a perfectly acceptable excuse to splash around in mud and play with rocks. We picked up as much as we could and placed our finds neatly into a ziplock baggy. So far, we have done nothing with them aside from some flecks I pasted in my scrapbook.



I can't believe I mentioned scrapbooking twice in the same blog. I promised Batman endorsed food reviews weeks ago, didn't I? Fuck.