The best tourist trap ever -- in our backyard

When I told Angie that her dad and I wanted to take Mason, 6, and Kendall, 4, to Myrtle Beach for a few days, her eyes registered amusement.

“Believe me, you don’t want to drive that far with them,” she said. That’s because Mason’s idea of the perfect distance to drive for a vacation is the Hampton Inn at Lewis-Gale Hospital, less than five miles from his home in Roanoke County.

“That’s not quite what your dad and I had in mind,” I said.

“You could take them to Natural Bridge,” she said, knowing what my programmed response would be. It’s one I had heard when I was Mason and Kendall’s age, and one I must have told her, too. But before I could say, “That place is a tourist trap,” she countered, “Everybody says it’s a great place for kids. They have a zoo.”

The lure of that and a couple nights in a hotel room won over Mason and Kendall. But we hadn’t gone two miles before Mason started his litany: “Are we there yet?” To his credit he did vary it with “How many more miles is it? and “Oh, brother! Do you know where we’re going?” Taking his mind off the car ride didn’t leave me much time to wonder how Natural Bridge got its unflattering reputation.

For a long time I thought that criticism was my parents’ personal prejudice. Over the years, though, I heard other Southwest Virginians voice a similar complaint. Many were suspicious when Natural Bridge’s owners called it one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. About 57 other places made the same claim.

I was amused to see Buchanan County native and author Lee Smith validate the two-thumbs-down reputation in her novel “Black Mountain Breakdown.” Her protagonist, Crystal Spangler, on her way to Richmond to vie for the Miss Virginia crown, tells her mother, she “would like to see the Natural Bridge.” Her mom’s friend Neva answers with a snort, “Tourist trap.”

That wasn’t the critique that its former owner Thomas Jefferson had hoped for. Enamored with the stone arch, he bought it and the land around it from King George III in 1774. In a letter to a friend, he said that he wanted to protect this treasure for the public.

One member of that public was a writer who gave the natural wonder the publicity Jefferson hoped for. At a pivotal moment in “Moby Dick,” Herman Melville conjured up the bridge’s image when Captain Ahab described the whale’s leap: “When the white whale slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge.” Melville’s stamp of approval was the nudge I needed to stand in a long line to buy tickets to see the bridge for my first time ever.

Mason and Kendall, who knew nothing of Melville or Jefferson, were eager to ride the bus that picked us up in front of the gift shop (all tourist traps have to have one) and took us down hill to the bridge. Luckily for Mason, it was a five-minute ride of amusement park caliber.

Like real natural wonders, pictures do not prepare you for your first view of it. Even Kendall and Mason were not immune to the bridge’s serene grandeur that rose in front of us when we rounded a bend in the path.

“Are we going to climb that rock?” asked Mason, eyeing the two columns of blue-gray limestone rising 215 feet straight up, before bending to join in an arch. Underneath, deep in its shadow, action-figure size tourists studied its underside and the sheer cliff bearing the initials of the man who surveyed it -- George Washington.

The path leading away from the stone monument connected it to a replica of the village of the Monacan Indians, probably the first people to see Natural Bridge. Walking under the thick trees, the earth covered with soft pine needles, was like stepping back in time. Even Mason was tongue-tied when a deerskin-clad Monacan stopped to ask him to trade shoes with him.

Only by telling the two that the bus was waiting to take us back to the gift shop did we drag them away from the flint knapper, basket weaver, and round-roofed twig huts. There were many more places to see: the zoo with animals they could pet, a cave billed as the deepest on the east coast, a haunted house, and a wax museum, adventures that are the lifeblood to any true tourist trap.

Before the day was over, I would bury that term. The demise started at the Natural Bridge, continued at the zoo and the cave, and ended with Mason and Kendall describing their excellent adventure to their mom and dad.

In the zoo’s gift shop, my husband ran into a high school buddy he hadn’t seen in years. With him was his granddaughter, who pulled at his arm, eager to see the animals.

As we stood at the cave’s entrance in the gift shop, waiting in line for the last tour of the day, my husband saw someone he recognized, a teenager who lives two houses down the street from us on Wintercreek Drive in Bluefield.

That wasn’t the last familiar face. With water dripping and the air thinning as we descended farther and farther into the cave’s belly, we recognized another Bluefielder, there with his wife and four children. Minutes later my husband was shaking hands with a golfing buddy and his wife. On a random summer day, a third of the last cave tour was from Bluefield.

Back home, Mason and Kendall put the nails in the tourist trap reputation’s coffin when they talked over top of each other, describing their “best day ever.”

“We saw dummies made out of wax, but they don’t melt even when it’s hot,” said Kendall.

“Did you know that there’s a beetle that lives down in the cave and it doesn’t live anywhere else?” said Mason.

“I was afraid the icicles would fall on my head,” said Kendall, to whom stalactites looked more like frozen water than rock.

“One of the Indians wanted me to give him my shoes, but I told him his shoes wouldn’t keep my feet warm,” said Mason. “And George Washington made a map of the bridge.”

“I rode Osha, the elephant. I touched her ears and they were prickly,” said Kendall.

“I don’t care how long it takes to get to Natural Bridge. I want to go back again,” said Mason.