Our last stop on the trip was the Oregon Caves. The road to get up to the cave was SO windy and long. When we finally made it one of the questions we asked the workers was whether or not they drive up here each day…and most of them don’t. They stay in the lodge all week and drive back down on the weekends. I was so glad for them.
Unfortunately we when we got there we found out the Neil wasn’t big enough to go in the cave and so he, Isaac and Emma stayed with Ken in the lodge lobby and played games and watched a movie while the big kids and I went through the cave.
The fist thing you see in the cave is a little stream named Styx from Greek mythology.
There were lots of cool features in the cave on the walls and ceilings.
At one part there was a man made entrance that had been made for easier access, but that changed the air flow through the cave which destroyed some of the features and affected some of the animals that lived in the cave. Once this was realized they installed some doors in in the man made part to fix the problem. I didn’t get a picture but early in the 1900’s a college professor would bring his class up to study the cave and they wrote on the rocks as they identified different features and now those notes have been covered in layers of new cave and you can hardly read them anymore. That was pretty cool!
One of the neatest parts was the gigantic room in the middle of the cave. It was so huge!
Over to the left there was a hidden cavity in the ceiling that we climbed up into to see these fun jellyfish formations. The stairs were incredibly steep and this cave has over 500 of them, but it was worth the extra effort.
In the big room headed to the right you go up the stairs and there is something on one of the walls that when you turn black lights on it it glows for just a few seconds. That was neat.
The last cool thing was they have found some ancient grizzly bear skulls and other skulls that they have left in the cave and just put a plastic box over them so everyone can look at them just where they were found.
You come out of the cave on the other side of the mountain and it was very pretty too, but way different from the Redwoods.
So we hadn’t made hotel reservations for the last night of our trip because we weren’t sure how busy the cave would be (and it was VERY busy), and when our tour time would be (we got the last or next to last tour). So after the cave we started driving…..and each little town we went through we would check all the hotels and they were all full!!! We couldn’t believe it on the first town and thought surly the next town would have one empty room, but no! every hotel had their no vacancy sign on. When it was close to midnight we just decided to skip looking for a hotel. Luckily Mark had downloaded the first Percy Jackson book to listen to on the ipod, so we plugged that into the car radio and that kept us awake. One funny thing was that we couldn’t get the shuffle feature to turn off, so the book randomly skipped around. When something all of the sudden didn’t make sense we knew one track had ended and we would have to go searching for the right one. A bit annoying, but that’s life.
Just a warning if you are driving across Oregon at night: there are a ton of bunnies out. I think we only hit two or three but Ken was dodging them a ton! Luckily we didn’t see any deer which was what I was really afraid of hitting going 75 mph.
We wearily made it back home around dinnertime and discovered one last vacation package we hadn’t opened…mustaches! So we donned a mustache before we ate some dinner, but most of the kids quickly took them off again because they were really itchy to wear :-).
I not sure how, because I remember being really tired after the drive, but apparently we made some apple pie that night too. Glad we have a picture to prove that! Isaac snacking on the apple peelings, or snakes as we call them.
The next day was Saturday and Ken had his annual Credit Union night at the Owlz game. Mark got to be the lucky guy to throw out the first pitch because Ken had posted a contest on their facebook page, but no one entered it. Mark was thrilled… and even though it wasn’t his best pitch ever it was still way fun!!
And the last thing before school started on Monday was Jessie made this fun brochure to give to our friends who were moving. Their move out and move in dates didn’t quite line up so they were homeless for a week; lucky us, they came and stayed with us at our house! Jessie did a great job! (The part about the Casino pool table was from our vacation….my kids had never seen any casinos, but we passed plenty on our drive and we had some fun laughs and silly discussions about them.)
Next up…school starts!
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