Useful Information
Opening Hours
Every show cave, mine or subterranea on this site has a short list
of hard facts called Useful Information.
With a contemporary browser it will be displayed like this text, with
smaller font and darkgreen letters on white background.
In the Useful Information block you find information in a very
brief form, which makes some explanation necessary.
It is very difficult to write dates, fees and hours in a well readable
manner, so we always tried to find a sort of "international" way
of writing it, which should be understood by anybody.
But if you do not understand it, here is the explanation:
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It is rather difficult to find a way to write date and time
in an international way!
The standard notation differs even from one English speaking country to
the next!
So we tried to find a notation which is easy to understand, even if one is
not used to it.
- Opening hours are given in a 24 hour notation, there is nothing
like a.m. and p.m..
The 24 hour notation is used similar to military time in some countries.
Unlike the Amerikan military time, which uses four digits for hours and
minutes (HHMM), we use just the hour.
Example: 3 p.m. is 15, 5 p.m. is 17, and so on.
Try yourself:
- Most public places open and close at the full hour.
If minutes are needed, they are added to the hour, divided by ":".
This mark is used only for times, and so it is easy to recognize that it means a time.
For example: half past 10 is 10:30.
- Dates:
The order in which year, month and day of a certain date are given differs
extremely.
A certain problem are dates with only numbers, e.g. 3/4/2003 would
mean 4th of March in the USA and 3rd of April in Britain.
An easy way to stop confusion between month and day is to write the name of
the month.
Very common and internationally used are the official IATA dates, which you
will find on any flight ticket.
Above date would be written 03APR2003.
As this is a little hard to read we also added a dash between the days,
month and year.
The days are given with two digits, the months are three letter
abbreviations of the English names, the year is given in four digits.
For example: 03-APR-2003.
- Some open hours depend on religios, e.g. Christian or legal hollidays.
This needs some explanations for non Christians:
- Easter:
In Europe it is common to open a cave at the Easter weekend,
which means the first open day will be Good Friday, the friday
before the Easter weekend.
All Easter and Pentecost related open hours are unfortunately different
every year, s Easter is always on a different weekend during March or
April.
- Palm Sunday: the Sunday before the Easter Weekend.
- Pentecost:
is seven weeks after Easter.
So if you know ehen Easer is, you also know when Pentecost is.
- All Saint's Day: the 1st of November.
- Memorial Day:
Rather common in the USA is in spring and an easy to remember holyday.
Memorial Day used to be 30th May but is now observed on the last Monday in May.
Memorial Day is abbreviated MD on this site.
- Labor Day:
is on different days, depending on the country.
In the USA it is the first Monday in September.
In European Countries it is often on 1st May.
Labor Day is abbreviated LD on this site.
- Unfortunately some open hours are based on local school holdays.
As we can not maintain a list of worldwide school holidays, we ask you to
search yourself for the actual dates on the internet.
Typically they are pretty easy to find, e.g. with
Google.
- If the age of the information is known, we give the year in which we
obtained it in sqaure parentheses.
Example: [2007]
Be aware that it may change every year.
If you need precise, actual opening hours, please call the phone number
given with the address or send an e-mail directly
to the cave (not to us please).
- The owners of show caves or mines may send actual information to us, we will
add them as soon as possible.
But we do not discuss with owners about removing hours, see comments below.
And please do not insult us for "wrong" hours, it they are just a little
outdated.
This is a free service for both, owners and visitors, and nobody forces
anyone to visit our site.
We are doing our best in providing current and correct information about any
cave or mine.
Unfortunately some managements seem to spend much of their time in changing
hours and fees.
Some even refuse to give hours, in order to be flexible, whatever this
may mean.
So our main goal for those two topics is to give at least a correct set of a
recent year, but not to keep it up to date at any cost.
We guess it is good enough if the hours are not older than five years, and our
visitors should be able to handle minor changes.
If caves change the hours in an erratic way or have drastic changes, outdated
hours on our site are their shame, not ours.
In general we prefer to spend our efforts on adding new sites, extending
descriptions and adding background info, not those technical facts.
See also
Sontheimer Höhle in Germany.