Singing Stones

I thoroughly enjoyed my stay the Quality Hotel in Hillsville, Virginia. I took advantage of the small but mighty fitness centre, where I watched The Searchers from the elliptical machine. The room was configured in a strange way, so I had to watch the movie's reflection in the wall of mirrors. It is interesting to watch a film backwards – some wise person suggested that we should watch films upside-down in order to appreciate their abstract beauty.

Earlier that evening I stopped for a pizza in Salem. The toddler at the next table kept turning around to stare at me. Maybe I had ordered something more interesting than his parents did.

Intrigued by the many highway signs promoting Luray Caverns, I decided to stop and experience subterranean Virginia. The main attraction was the organ that plays stalactites – indeed, a "stalacpipe" organ. You can arrange for a live performance if you book the chamber for your wedding (as over 700 couples have done), but for our purposes, the tour guide pressed a button to put it into player-piano mode. It played A Mighty Fortress is Our God. The sound was more delicate than I had expected - like a xylophone, specifically, the metalophone that I remember from grade four music class at Elmwood – it was my favourite and I was always so happy when I got to play it. It made me so smile to think of the organ's inventor crawling around the cave with his mallets and tuning forks, hunting for singing stones.

In the final stretch of tunnel, there was, of all things, a war memorial, listing men from that county who had died in WWI and II, Korea and Vietnam. The tour guide explained that they have this memorial because nearly 500,000 people come through the caves every year, so lots of people will see it. This is an interesting line of reasoning.