Vacation - Day 5: Adventures In Nature

Day five of vacation was basically split in two.  The first part of the day was for David and the second part of the day was for me.

When we were planning our vacation, David said he wanted to take the kids through the Civil Defense Caves.  They're not far from Sugar City.  They were once used as a possible bomb shelter option during the cold war.  I said, "Sure.  Let's go."  I don't think I really had any clue what they entailed. I'm not sure what I was thinking: that they were Timpanogas-like with lighting and tour guides? a small little hole in a rock that we could explore?  Whatever it was, I was wrong.  My first clue was when David raided his parents closets for all the coats and flashlights he could find.  Seriously - if I had known, I could have packed the kids coats from home so that they actually fit them!

We drove out to the middle of nowhere and found the cave.  It is pretty cool.  And you would NEVER guess that it's there from the surface.

So, as you enter the mouth of the cave, you drop down a boulder-strewn shaft.  It gets cold and wet and dark very very quickly.  The cave is 40 feet underground and about a half mile long. As soon as I started down, I began to feel a little panicked.  It was a bit more treacherous than I'd anticipated.  Especially for Quinton.   David and I had a few stressful words - not angry words, just stressful words.   I was concerned.  David said, "Fine.  You stay here and wait with Quinton."  I didn't like that idea.  In the end, I decided that we were all just going to do it together, come what may.  

The inside of the cave is actually very cool. Cool like amazing and cool like freezing. It's pitch black, icy in spots, and there are occasional piles of boulders to maneuver around. The ceiling sometimes gets low enough that you have to duck, but never so low that you have to crawl.  In other places, it seems stories high.  The whole place is covered in graffiti.  The four older kids loved it!  

Quinton put a major damper on the fun, though.  If we had it to do over, we would leave him behind with Grandma and Grandpa.  Not only was it difficult for him to climb, but he was cold and angry.  He wanted to hold a flashlight and he DIDN"T want Dad's help AT ALL! He screamed and cried in outrage nearly the entire time - it echoed through the caves in a delightful chorus of rage.

We basically had the cave all to ourselves for the most part.  We only saw a few other people, but that was right at the end.  In spite of the crying baby, I think everyone had a good time.   There was no denying it was a cool cave.  The thing that touched me was how concerned and thoughtful my kids were, especially my boys.  They kept coming over to check on me and make sure I had enough light, my feet were okay, etc.  

Alison was way ahead of us most of the time.  We kept having to call her back.  

This isn't the best picture, but it's right at the end, as the kids are starting to emerge.

And here's the boys after our little adventure.

As we did the day before, we went home to Grandma and Grandpa's house to eat our picnic lunch and put the boys down for their naps. When they woke up, we went on MY adventure.

There's no way to plan this, but as luck would have it, our vacation happened to fall on the one or two weeks per year that wild huckleberries are in season. I LOVE picking wild huckleberries!  I'd never heard of it before I moved to Idaho, and I never missed a year once I did hear of it.  Huckleberry patches are heavily guarded secrets in some circles.  It's funny to hear stories of families where not even the in-laws are allowed to see the family maps that locate their favorite patches.  It's a little insane!

We tried the just-pull-over-every-few-miles-and-see-if-you-find-huckleberries approach.  I mean, we knew basically which area of the forest to be looking, but we just decided to wing it from there.  It took about four tries, but we found some berries!  We discovered that it was pretty picked over near the road, but the deeper we got into the forest, the farther away from the road, the more berries we found!  Pretty soon, we found some beautiful patches!

There's Bronson and I.  He did a super job for a long time!  One of his favorite bedtime stories is "Blueberries for Sal" so he felt like he was in that book!  He got tired after a while, so I just told him to take a break and that he didn't have to pick for the family anymore.  He could eat everything he picked.  That was good enough for him!

There's Alison.  She and Nicole were fantastic pickers!  And Nicki helped me keep the boys happy once they wore out.

Josh did a great job for a while.  Then, he got bored and I told him the same thing I told Bronson.  However, he couldn't resist helping the family here and there.  It really is kind of addicting. You can't just walk past a loaded bush without stopping to pick!

We picked for an hour or so.  Not too long. Then, we had to find our van again - we had wandered a bit while picking!  But we found it! 

We picked about a quart of berries.  On the way home, we picked up a pizza (we REALLY wanted to eat at Big Jud's but it was PACKED when we drove by) and a gallon of ice cream.  Then, we went back to Grandma and Grandpa's house and make huckleberry milkshakes. They were yummy!!!  Then, we watched Zootopia with Grandma and Grandpa.  They'd never seen it before.  We let the boys stay up late to share it with them.  Bronson didn't make it - we had to carry him to bed.  He was really tired from all our adventures!

And with that, we basically wrapped up our vacation.  The next morning, we cleaned, packed, and drove home.  David had a couple more days off, which he used to get some stuff done around the house.  What a great week!