Getting the flavor of...Kansas’s salt caverns

Kansas’s salt caverns

A visit to the Kansas Underground Salt Museum is “no trip to Disney World,” said Lisa Gutierrez in The Kansas City Star. Before boarding an elevator that takes you 650 feet below Hutchinson, you have to strap a breathing apparatus around your neck to use in case of emergency. But if you survive the claustrophobia-inducing descent, a new world opens up—tall, broad caverns carved into a salt bed that stretches from Kansas to New Mexico. Mining of the 275-million-year-old salt continues just beyond the museum’s limits, but visitors are welcome to grab a chunk when their tram car makes its stops. I opted to join the Dark Ride, highlighted by a moment when the guide flips off the lights to plunge visitors into incredibly disorienting darkness. Yet around the bend waited a more reassuring sight—a Batman costume once worn by George Clooney. Many Hollywood treasures, it turns out, are stored down here in vaults not open to the public.

Grand Central at 100

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Celebrate Grand Central Terminal’s 100th birthday by slowing down the next time you pass through New York City’s famous train hub, said Marshall S. Berdan in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The official audio tour is “a movable feast of facts and figures.” Did you know that the idea of time zones originated here at the world’s largest rail station? Or that the acorns and oak leaves in the ornamental stonework are family symbols of William K. Vanderbilt, who bankrolled construction? Follow the tour’s instructions and you’ll get a chance to see how the tiled arches in the “whispering gallery”—just outside the 1913 Oyster Bar—throw voices to the opposite corner. While it’s hard not to “just stand stupefied” below the 125-foot-high main ceiling and its aqua-blue astronomical mural, you’ll get tidbits about that too. That black smudge in the northwest corner? That’s how dark the ceiling had become before the terminal’s 1998 renovation.