Like last year, this year we ended up spending our summer vacation week visiting an amusement park and a succession of caves. In fact, it was the same amusement park as last summer, mainly because it was on the way to the caves.
The caves were closer to home than last year, and unfortunately all of them were the guided tour type of excursion, rather than like the Lava Beds caves we visited last year, where one is allowed to wander at will. That aside, the caves were fantastic. We went to Black Chasm, California Caverns, Mercer Caverns, and Moaning Cavern, even finding the time to do a night of car camping and Sequoia-ogling at Calaveras Big Trees State Park. I got to do a tandem zip line ride with Willow at Moaning Cavern, zipping down the 1500 foot cable over the dry scrub below. We also checked out nearby Natural Bridge, which featured a creek that had worn a tunnel through the limestone.
While in town of Volcano, which is where Black Chasm is, we wandered through the old Catholic cemetery there, finding a letterbox as we did so. We soaked up a lot of history at every stop, seeing a Cave Bear skeleton at California Caverns, and piles of bones on display at Moaning Cavern (not to mention some still in place on the cavern floor, left behind by people and animals who took the quick way down). There was one skull said to be from a Chinese girl who fell the 165 feet to the bottom of the cavern around 12,000 years ago. In Angels Camp, we checked out the museum, which was full of artifacts from the Gold Rush days, not to mention plenty of history related to the famous frog jumping contest, instigated by the Mark Twain story. The girls generally seemed to like the places we visited, although I think they both enjoyed the amusement park part the best. Ha.
Oh yeah, we also went to the Jelly Belly factory and went on the free tour. Needless to say, we bought some jelly bellies before hitting the road again.
The trip was well documented, of course.
We've been back a week now. At camp this week, Sophie came along and had a fun time. She got to be in my group too, which was nice. The Hognose snake wasn't in his cage on Monday (somebody needs a lesson on how to properly secure the top), but when I was getting food for the other animals on Wednesday, I discovered him crawling across the floor in the Nature Lab. I put him back in his cage, and the first thing he did was get a drink. It has been a parched summer.
Speaking of dryness, I think this is a contributing factor to our Yellow Jacket problems this year. There are so many more of them around than I've ever seen before. One group of kids got attacked on Wednesday as they navigated the narrow trail that follows the creek. I knew where that nest was, because a group I was leading stumbled over it several weeks previously. Then, on Friday, while on a "critter hunt" (an activity that I love to lead), we were looking under some old sections of brick wall that pepper the chaparral area. I had already looked under a few, finding a pretty little baby Rattlesnake under one, when one of the kids pointed to another and said, "I have a weird feeling about that one." It was set in the ground pretty well, so I really had to yank to free it from the dry dirt, and of course when I did, the Yellow Jackets were already boiling out of the ground. 10 people got stung, including a boy that got stung 5 times. Once I got all of the kids to safety and swatted the wasps off of them, I had to go back and get the plastic cage I'd dropped a few feet from the nest. By that time, the wasps had stopped boiling over, and were settling back down. I managed to grab the cage without getting stung again (I had initially gotten stung twice). It took awhile to calm down the boy who'd gotten stung the most, but for the other kids, it proved to be no big deal. One small girl, who couldn't have been more than 7 or 8, was particularly inspiring, shaking the whole experience off with a smile. Some kids are cool that way.
I'll add the location to our ever-growing list of areas to avoid, and the next time a kid says he has a "weird" feeling about something, I'll ask if he means good-weird or bad-weird. I guess he must have meant bad-weird, which is interesting because, as far as I know, none of us actually saw any Yellow Jackets flying around until I pulled off their roof. The kid had a bona fide psychic moment.
Currently listening to: Various "PM50"
No comments:
Post a Comment