Mammoth Caves and Mammoth Celebrations

I turned 30 earlier this year, The kids and Ryan made me a very nice cake and we had a small quiet celebration (See previous blog entry). My birthday wish was really to delay celebrating my birthday since I was 9 months pregnant and couldn't really have much fun. Well, my wish came true. We didn't make it to a topical island with beautiful beach and fruity drinks, but we did have fantastic time crawling around with bats and cave crickets, racing down alpine slides, rappelling off a cliff, and drinking some beer. Most importantly, we were kid free for the weekend!!!

My two great friends, Siusan and Crystal, joined me from DC for these adventures, and to also celebrate their 30th birthdays. (Don't we have some great legs!)

Here we are getting ready to launch ourselves down the alpine slide (think bobsled without the ice).

The caving was awesome. We spent about six hours underground and did about six miles. Mammoth caves has 376 miles of mapped tunnels, so we hardly made a dent in exploring this cave system. In fact, the say that the wild cave tour is different every time you go. We spent the first half our our trek spending a lot of time crawling on our hands and knees and shimming through tight places. The second half was more vertical walking through the carved out stream beds and hiking on the old cave tour trails (circa 1900). We also managed to stay dry on this cave trip (just very dusty), where as I have done caved twice before and have had to wade in waist deep water and mud.

Ryan and his best friend, Mark, had wanted to come back to Mammoth Caves since they were teenagers, and they had planned out their whole trip to include camping, the wild cave tour, and rappelling. I was accused of stealing his vacation, when I suggested that my girlfriends and I go caving for our 30th birthdays. I told him that he has had the last 15 years to take this vacation, and it was his own fault that he hadn't made it happen. So, I let him tag along on my vacation. He and Mark opted to fulfill their teenage dreams and camp in the national park, while the rest of us stayed at a bed and breakfast. As you can see he also got his rappelling in, so overall he can say that he accomplished everything that he wanted to on this trip.

I wasn't dumb enough or brave enough to go off the cliff face first. Overall, all parties involved had a blast, and we can't wait to plan our next adventure.