Friday, June 26, 2009

There's no such thing as a Cave Taco.

The drive down to Kentucky was, for me, pretty uneventful. We stopped at a Goodwill in some tiny Ohio town for a minute. They had a Fleetwood Mac LP from the early '80s I thought of getting. Knowing that it would turn into a pile of melted vinyl as soon as we shut off the air-conditioning detered me.

A couple days before we left I watched Duel, the made-for-TV movie by Steven Spielberg from the early '70s. It's about a traveling salesman who is constantly chased and almost killed on multiple occasions by a psychotic semi driver. It's decent pre-Maximum Overdrive big rig terror and I had a couple OH GOD moments since the semi to car ratio was about 3 to 1 in Kentucky. This included one guy who would not stop riding my ass and flashing his brights at me. I lost him on a big hill somewhere. Also of note in Kentucky: Louiville has 21 locations of Cox's Smoker's Outlets. I'm just saying...

It's been about 90+ degrees all day both days we've been camping at Mammoth Cave. Starting and tending a fire in this heat has been pretty ridiculous. Wednesday night we scrounged up some moldy, worm-holed wood left scattered at the campsite which burned awful. Also I broke the hachet we brought with us hacking up some poor sapling. At least the total fail of a fire yielded grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup and s'mores.

Thursday we did the Wild Cave Tour at 10am. Laura got up early and started a rage/lighter fluid fire to heat up coffee and oatmeal before we left. It was a good choice to get these things in our systems because we were underground for about 6 hours. Not only did it wear me out physically, but it bruised probably 50% of my body.

It really ruled though. We climbed up huge boulder piles, down water-carved canyons and crawled on knees and elbows through incredibly small spaces -- the smallest of which was about 9 inches high. Although I'd never faced anything to prove or disprove it, I'd thought there was a tiny chance I was a touch claustrophobic. Getting wedged into these places again and again and not even coming close to losing it has me thinking otherwise.

Currently my forearms two big purple masses and there's a deep red line across my abdomen, but nothing hurts much. This might be thanks to the endorphines or the vodka and Tang we're drinking. *Addedum: everything's a LOT more sore today, but it's that good kind of hurt. Except when it's the hurting kind of hurt.*

Laura made some great tacos for dinner. (A side note: I told her I was going to eat 50 tacos on this trip. She's supplied me with 3. Things are looking good.)

--Aaron

1 comment:

  1. only 50 tacos? try 100 and then MAYBE i'll be impressed.

    ReplyDelete