Oct 11 '17 at 9:45
Arrived early on a Saturday morning (Oct. 7, 2017 8:30am) for the BUNKER TOUR and the front of the hotel was bathed in glorious sunlight. It makes for stunning pictures. The hotel’s interior is an eclectic mash-up of bright and pastel colors, elegant designs and finishings, and crazy carpet and tile patterns that seem impossible, but somehow manage to work well together to make an incredible palatial, luxurious, opulent, and magnificent visual.
The Bunker Tour starts 15 minutes earlier than your “posted start time”, and they tell you this, so don’t lolly-gag around and drift up at the last minute holding everyone else up because you want to be fashionably late. They do take your phone and all electronics, give you a receipt, and a second tour representative brings them along and locks them up in a room at the beginning of the tour inside the bunker. Allow time for this as well.
As a group you walk from the Trellis Lobby a distance over to elevators that take you up to the West Virginia Wing of the hotel, then the tour starts at one of the blast doors. Onwards into a large convention hall and showroom, another blast-door (this one bigger), one of the Congressional work-meeting rooms (you see the picture on the website), down long sterile military-gray halls towards a pair of rooms filled with museum-quality memorabilia from before the Bunker was deactivated, and then you get to watch a movie showing a history of the bunker showing why and how it was built. Another blast-door, a view down a football field-long, dark access tunnel, decontamination shower rooms, generator rooms, and a dining hall. In between all of the room visits you get a LOT of background and history of the Bunker that’s not included in the short film.
Remember - They do take your phone and all electronics, give you a receipt at the beginning of the tour. You get them back at the end of the tour after the dining hall. They walk everyone out as a group to a common place and then you’re free to go from there.
For the price, and the detailed history of the Bunker and what you get to see, I’d say it was worth having done it. I drove 3-hrs one-way for the sole purpose of the tour and don’t regret it. Overall quite enjoyable and well worth my time!