We were talking about doghouses in a meeting today and I piped up that the GG has a van Gogh in his doghouse so it really isn’t a punishment for him but then I divulged my retort to some snarky husband-wife comments that were uttered in a restaurant in Fla on the morning of the day we commenced our return trip to the Great White North. And yes, it was a long drive but it was fun.

The day after I made that retort, we drove from Gainesville to Chattanooga and we were king of nattering around about what to do the next day. I was kind of thinking about the Smokies. As we approached Chattanooga, the GG said, “Wanna go on a Cave Tour tomorrow?” Well, hmmm… Did I? If you know me, you know that I [usually] have to think about “new” ideas for a while, sometimes a short while, before I warm up to them. I get a wee bit nervous about caves but I was more concerned about Weather, as there was a potential for tornadoes the next day. So a part of me just wanted to get outta Dodge Chattanooga as early as possible the next day. Fortunately I made myself chill out and the weather also chilled out — down to 53 degrees, which is usually too cold to generate funnel clouds of any significance. Okay. We’ll do the cave tour.

I admit, I was nervous about the cave tour (even though it is a major tourist attraction and umpteen gazillion people go through it each year) but I overthink stuff like this. We took an elevator 1200 feet (?) down the mountain and I felt “dizzy” as we began our walk through this place. I was thinking stuff like earthquake (Nepal that day? I think?), flood (it does flood occasionally but not catastrophically), collapse, alligators and poisonous snakes, bats (there are no bats or anything other living beings down there). Didn’t matter to me that a couple of huge tour groups were ahead of us or that the other folks on our tour didn’t seem freaked out at all, including the man who had recently undergone a knee replacement. What a trouper! I didn’t let on that I was nervous at the beginning (I don’t think) and the friendly tour guides and history videos calmed my nerves considerably until wow, what a good time. I think it helped that we were in a VERY small tour group – six people as opposed to 30 or 60 or whatever. In hindsight, I wonder if that was because 1) one of our group had a knee replaced recently and couldn’t necessarily keep up in a 60-person group and 2) they threw us in that small group because we are around the same age — let’s put the baggy old people together in a small group. Whatever. It was a wonderful tour and maybe that’s one of the perks of not coloring your [white] hair.

Photos below. Some might think the colored lights are a bit overdone. I enjoyed them but then I like lots of colors. But there were plenty of areas that were lit up with a more natural light color. And how about that underground waterfall.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2015 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.