A tourist trap - or so I thought

Have you ever been on a road trip and seen a billboard-every mile for 10 miles-advertising some local attraction? The billboards don't give much information just enough to get you curious enough to stop. You know what I'm talking about. It's usually right off the freeway and the minute you pull in you know your about to part with more money than you bargained on. In other words - A tourist trap. I would think those same thoughts every time I would drive past Inner Space Cavern on I35 going to and from one of my favorite stores (Ikea). Today, however, Kurtis and I felt like being tourists and decided that we would finally see what Inner Space Cavern was all about. It is a cavern 5 miles long loaded with stalagmites, stalagtites, and fossils of prehistoric animals, i.e. giant sloths, saber tooth tigers, and wooly mammoths. The discovery of Inner Space Cavern was because of I35 and not just a way to take advantage of the weary traveler. When they were building I35 back in the 60's they were taking 6" core samples to determine if the ground would support the weight of a freeway and the samples revealed the cavern. So they dug a hole and lowered some poor brave soul down and entered into the "discovery room." They actually altered the route of the freeway to bypass the cavern. It was very educational and worth while. So Inner Space Cavern turns out not to be a tourist trap after all. Judging by the crowds today, a lot of people are already wise to that fact but not too many that we had to fight the crowd. Maybe they need to change their billboards to make it look like more of an archealogical dig site and not a tourist trap.