Holy smokes, what I pictured for a salt mine wasn't at all what is in existence. The Wieliczka salt mine has been around since the Middle Ages, and there are over 300 kilometers of passages already mined. We ourselves were taking a tour of only 3 km, and that felt enormous.
We descended hundreds of meters into the mine by taking (what else?) the stairs, and what a chance to experience vertigo! Holy smokes, we looked down the center of the stairway, and it made our stomachs turn:
We began walking down the passageway, not realizing that everything--the floor, the walls, the ceiling--was made from salt. Or perhaps a better way to put it was that everything was salt. You could lick anything (and believe me, Glo did), and you'd know immediately that it was salt. It honestly looked like polished marble because it was so hard and clear, and it was hard to believe that every statue in the mine was carved by miners themselves. Ethan said that it felt like the Mines of Moria down there.  |
| This was when Ethan first admitted that the place felt like the Mines of Moria. Don't you agree? |
One of the most destructive forces to a mine is water. Think about it. What happens to salt when it's put in water? Consequently, the mine has all methods to remove the run off. Glo was brave enough to taste it, and I wish I'd taken a picture of her face after she did so. Ethan was brave enough too.
We finally walked into "the chapel", a huge room (the largest underground chapel in Europe), and I had to pinch myself. It just couldn't possibly be real, and yet it is. There were beautiful pictures from the New Testament carved into the walls all around us. When our tour guide, Margaret, told us that the acoustics were unparalleled, and rather tongue-in-cheek invited us to sing together, we Kennedys took full advantage by singing a verse of "Abide with Me". Try as hard as we might to sing quietly, it was impossible; our voices filled the room. Again, such a testament to the human spirit, thinking of the centuries of miners carving out those rooms and finding something beautiful underground.
The tour ended up taking about three hours, and in the end, we didn't have to climb all of the stairs that we had taken down into the mine (thank goodness). However, we did end up in a teeny tiny functioning mine elevator that felt more like a roller coaster ride at an amusement park than a means to an end for us to see the light of day again.
We still had a four hour drive back to Warsaw. In fact, we didn't believe it would actually take four hours to drive back, because we only had around 260 kilometers to cover. But, as it turns out, when you are allowed to only drive 36 mhm (or 60 kph) all the way back to Warsaw, it does indeed take a little over four hours to get home! Gah! Needless to say, we were happy to climb into bed.
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