I’ve been hoping, really, really hoping that it would work out for me to go caving with my *adopted parents this past weekend. It was one of those deals where we weren’t going to know until the last minute though, so that was a bummer.

Wednesday evening I finally decided it just wasn’t going to happen and I called my dad to let him know. He was disappointed of course, but understood. Then, low and behold, with a lot of help from some wonderful people, we were able to make it work out!

I arrived at the Creation Museum mid morning on Friday and had a delightful day there (which I’ll blog about at a later date) and then early Saturday morning my parents and I drove the six or so hours to the Cumberland Caverns in TN.

We did this same trip last year (see here and here) which is when my great endearment to the deep recesses of the earth first began to grow in my heart. Caving… What can I say? It’s amazing. It’s fun. It’s adventuresome. It’s freaky. And sleeping in a cave? Oh, so, so much better than just spending several hours down in the belly of the earth.

We had a lot of repeat people from last year, plus a whole host of newbies. There were about 140 people who did the walk-thru part of the cave which included a concert by my dad, supper, and watching the Extreme Caving DVD, most of which was filmed inside the cave.

Then we began the ‘extreme’ part of the caving. One of our friends who was along kept all of us in the back of the group entertained with his mimicking of many different accents and cartoon characters. Of course that launched me into a several hour long British-accent-spree and pretty soon we had other people joining in with different accents as well. When I finally stopped talking in the British accent, one of the guides gave me a weird look and asked “Weren’t you the one talking with a British accent?” I guess I was pretty convincing. One of the best parts of the extreme caving is when our friend sang to us in Donald Duck’s voice. It was like we were standing in the presence of talent. 😉

Caving this year was amazing. I got to meet lots of new and interesting people, made friends out of pervious strangers, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I can’t wait to go again! By the way, if you want to check out my book that includes a caving adventure, you can find it here.

What about you? Does caving sound like something you’d enjoy?

*I’ll be leaving off the ‘adopted’ for the rest of the post