Huntsville Alabama

We were camped about 25 miles from Huntsville Alabama and found this Bat Cave about 3 miles from the park, during the prime summer months close to half a million Gray bats exit this cave at dusk. During the rest of the year the bats still come out but the number is much smaller, we never made it down there at dusk because it would have been scary.

Also about 6 miles from the park is the Cathedral Caverns, this caverns holds 4 different world records, one for the largest cave entrance (see picture below) it is over 128 feet wide and all natural, another is for the largest stone water flow (see picture below) the third is for the largest stalagmite, didn’t get a good picture of that, and I forgot the fourth. Everything is so large that it was almost impossible to get any good pictures, the guide takes you back about 2800 feet and at one point you’re standing on a ledge and you can see for 800 feet both in front of you and behind. There wasn’t a lot of color in the rocks or formations but just the shear size of everything makes this worth taking the tour.

The one night we were there they had a mini rodeo, this was just for kids 12 and under, some of the kids were pretty good as you can see in the pictures. The really young ones 4 & 5 were strapped into the saddles so they couldn’t fall off, some had a look on their face of pure joy and others had the look that said “Dad I’ll never forgive you for this”. The funny part was they had stick horses, you know like a broom stick with a horse head on it, and the kids do the race around the barrels, boy they were giving it everything they had.

We drove over to Huntsville and did a walk through their Botanical Gardens, we were surprised at how much was in bloom this late in the year, they have probably the best Herb Garden that we’ve every seen, it had everything that you could think of. There was a contest going on for the best scarecrow, there had to be about 100 of them scattered through out the gardens

This was the kid’s garden had a lot of hands on things for the kids to do.

The columns are the original columns from the first state capital built in the early 1800’s