Brandon’s planned vacation work day turned quickly into Brandon’s vacation flu day. We decided to get away from camp and let him be miserable with his germs by himself, and hopefully avoid getting his gross bug in our systems.
There were two items on our “let’s do that” list for today. First, we wanted to explore a tourist trap cave.
I am not sure how many cities go from City to wilderness in the space of 5 minutes, but Rapid City does. This cute little cavern shack promised to be as packaged and adorable as we wanted. The tour consisted of the five of us, and an older couple from Missouri.
This is where the tour started. There was a nice, big opening for us to walk through. However, do you see that hole up there on that canyon wall up there? See it right there next to the pine tree leaning out of the hill? No? You don’t see it? Well, neither did we, but some guy did see it! There was this guy gold prospecting in these here hills, and he got stranded in this creek-ish gorge. He looked up, and somehow saw a little hole. He somehow knew it was a cave, and he somehow knew he could fit into that hole. He is also the guy with the best eyes in history. That’s a fact.
Here’s something interesting: This cave was never a mine. It has only ever been explored by people who are looking for adventure and yet another tunnel.
Our guide was a young kid named Ean, a senior in high school. He had explored much of the cave, and knew how to avoided dying by becoming lodged in extraordinarily tight spaces.
One day, he said, a few years ago, he was giving a tour when a guest accidentally dropped his keys down a deep hole. Well, our guide knew that the way to the bottom of that hole was through a very tight tunnel 2.5 hours in and 2.5 hours out. When Ean was off work, he headed down the tunnel to fetch the keys. At one point, he became wedged in the tunnel and could not move in or out. Luckily, he knew how to hold his arms when going through very tight tunnels, and so dislodged himself. He said that had he held his arms differently, he would have been lodged in there, an hour and a half from the entrance, and nobody knew the tunnels like he does. He would have died there. When he got back to the cave shop where the man was waiting, the man simply gave him a high five, and told him thanks.
This 17-year-old kid, 15 at the time, talked about this like it was no big deal. He had to stay after work, unpaid, for five hours. He almost got stuck and died. The guy was barely grateful. Shoot, the guy OUGHT to have handed him $100, or a Jimmy John’s gift card, or at least should have asked what his favorite food was and went to fetch it while Ean was in the tunnel. But only a high five. And Ean was hardly phased.
If this is what the kids here turn out like, I want my kids to finish off here.
The couple on our tour were farmers from Missouri. The wife was maybe more chatty than any person I’ve known, and her husband was silent. He said maybe 10 words on the tour. She said maybe 10,000. She was, at first, quite hen-pecking about the kids. However. I told her that Judah wanted to be a row farmer like they were, and her entire demeanor changed. As she noticed that the kids were good and calm and respectful, she engaged them in conversation, and by the end of the tour, we were all great friends.
It was certainly the best cave tour I have been on.
The second item on our list was the alpine slide in Keystone. We drove the pine-forested road around the mountain, and up into the tourist-trappiest town on earth. As many times as we have driven that road, it is always beautiful. We always see deer, remark at the wooden arched bridge, the thick, bright green grass, and then you are suddenly in Keystone.
We were met with some bad news: because of some rain, the alpine slide had been closed for the day. Well, not the biggest deal. We were all tired, and the kids wanted to swim, so we headed back to the campground.
Even on vacation, we have trouble NOT making things, and the girls wanted to tie dye, so we did. Kiara is interested in ice dying, but we had no rack. Fortunately, we have a lot of sparkling water cans, because it is our dirty addiction, and so we piled them up and piled on the ice and dye. We found some nearly-free buckets at Walmart for the other project.
We are social distancing from each other tonight. Atticus has started to throw up, and there is a feeling of doom in the air. Brandon is in the adult tent by himself, I’m in the kids tent, and Atticus is outside on the ground with Judah some distance away. Brothers are the best!
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