Mammoth Cave revisited, and Interactive Fiction hope
News ·Saturday August 31, 2013 @ 21:22 EDT (link)
Friday was our tenth anniversary; so I took off from work early; we had planned to go down to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky on Saturday, so we drove down to Elizabethtown, KY and stayed overnight at the Fairfield Inn there (with a nice whirlpool tub). The room was nice, but a little smaller than I expected; but then, it wasn't a suite. I gave Honey some diamond earrings I'd been shopping for a few weeks before when she was out of town, and she gave me a nice card (and might be getting me something else later; I'm supposedly hard to shop for). We ate at the Texas Roadhouse, which was fine but we planned to go somewhere special for our "real" anniversary dinner (see next entry). We left in the morning right before checkout at noon, heading down to the cave, mindful that we got an extra hour since it was in Central time and we weren't, yet.
We took two tours, which I had reserved ahead of time: the New Entrance tour at 1300, which we had to take a bus to the start of, and the Historic tour, which was right near the visitor center (although down a bit of a hill which was no fun coming back up at the end). Both lasted two hours, and happened to have the same ranger guides for both: John and Michael (Michael talked more on the first, John on the second).
The last time I had been in the cave was about 10 years ago, in March 2002 (photos). There were some new rules this time, notably, no backpacks or rucksacks (to help preserve the cave walls), and people had to walk on "biomats" (spongy mats with some sort of anti-bacterial soap on them) after leaving to avoid spreading "white nose disease", a fungus that kills bats. Also, when I went back then, I went on a tour (Grand Avenue, four and a half hours, $18, so $4/hour vs. $6/hour now) that wasn't being offered at present (due to cuts, i.e., Washington monument syndrome). I also got to take my tripod in; it wasn't officially sanctioned then (don't know about monopods, but they aren't allowed now), as one of the rangers told me at the end, but he didn't bother me about it since he could see I was being careful and not getting in people's way. Which is an eminently sensible attitude about rules (much like the range officer at Silverdale was saying when we were there last; rules are meant to serve man, not the other way around). I much preferred using a tripod and the lights set up in the cave to having to use flash as I did this time.
Michael was a very entertaining guide, and good at getting people, including the kids in the crowd, to quiet down (John was less good at that, but he told a good tale of his family's historical connections to the cave as inspiration for future generations to protect it). Both tours had us sit on benches in open areas for information and questions (and to help stragglers catch up, I suppose); we moved at a good pace but not too quickly.
There were a lot of stairs going down (280?) at the start of on the New Entrance tour. Michael told us they cost taxpayers $3000 (back 30? years ago)&hellip per stair, and asked if we thought we got good value for our money. Given that a nuclear sub contractor had done it, and probably overcharged a great deal just because they already knew their way around the federal bidding process, I expect not, but amortized over time it probably wouldn't have been a huge deal even if (and if only) it had only been paid for voluntarily.
At one of the areas with benches we were sitting near the front and I mentioned Crowther and Woods and Colossal Cave Adventure to see if he'd heard of them, and knew what locations (since I knew it was in Kentucky) inspired them. Not only did he know of them, but he programmed interactive fiction as a hobby. And yes, Colossal Cave does connect to Mammoth, but it is closed to the public although some IFers have been allowed in to write about the connections to the game. (I suppose over the years enough tourists would come by asking that even an uninterested person would look them up.) Which gave me hope for humanity, if a government employee is doing something like that. We talked a little later after the second tour, and he told me he used TADS 3, although said he would have to learn about object-oriented programming (it seems TADS 2 didn't do that; TADS 3 was pretty smart to go with prototype-based objects, for flexibility and ease of use, like Javascript). I read up on TADS a little later (Sunday), and it's a C-like language with some great built-in syntax for building rooms, objects, relationships, verbs, and the like. (I worked through a tutorial, and am playing through the web hosted version of Return to Ditch Day now, in fact.)
We drove back that day (getting in around 2300), and stayed up and slept in the next day.
Books finished: The Golden Compass.
