We are down to the last 10 hour stretch. After a less comfortable night in our first Super 8, we woke up and shot straight out to Mammoth Cave. Our 9am historical tour took us through the natural entrance, a huge cavern with cold air rushing out. We walked 2 hours through enormous caverns and tight passages, down 300 feet and back up a soaring tower. It was wonderful, the last national park as awesome as the first. It has been a wonderful adventure.
I have been thinking a lot about adventure. I remember from my master's thesis that adventure is related to the idea of chance or fortune. I looked it up, and it also seems to be related to daring, and the risk of loss. An adventure, therefore, is not all fun, but necessarily includes fear, frustration, and loss. An adventure is opening yourself up to chance. I like the spontaneity, and the constant novelty. But we had to learn to tolerate the frustrations of constant time on the learning curves. I find that to be very refreshing in my overly structured life. I am reading books by Patrick Leigh Fermor about his travels at 18 when he walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople just before WWII. His travels were an adventure for sure, as he never could be sure what the next day would bring. It wasn't always pleasure. We also had 6 of the 9 Little House on the Prairie recorded books with us. Pa was an adventurer, but often his restlessness put the family at risk. Yet he seemed to glory in figuring his way out of disaster. Reading those two sets of stories while traveling put my own trip into perspective. We tend to get very upset when something goes wrong, though if course our problems are really quite small, especially now, when a little extra cost or some lost time is a big deal only if we make it so. I feel like that is part of what travels teach us, if we are really traveling, as opposed to being tourists. The learning we had to do about camping, about packing the car, about making advance reservations or waiting until we arrived to figure out accommodation, about coking out and travel games, all are really small adjustments, but we are used to our habits and to our comfortable, predictable lives. We don't have a lot of adventure, really, either the pleasure of exploration, or the frustration of constant adjusting to new circumstances. We also learned a lot about ourselves as a family, and we also had to adjust as we changed from 5 to 4. We had a lot of jokes, and kept falling into patterns of behaviors, like going to bed at dusk when camping, or each falling into a particular job. Ellie specialized in tent poles. Phil organized the car. I took charge of dishes and keeping Ellie clean. Jeremiah played pied piper and kept all the kids busy with football or Frisbee or jackpot. I think that this long adventure has been refreshing for sure, and good for us as a family. It also gave us a new appreciation for the beauty and variety of our own country. I think we will be better at camping, and I hope we will do it more. We did a lot of hiking, and again, I hope that will be something we find more opportunities for.
We split up, and Dad went with Randy and Mary to view a glacier from a rest stop, while we wanted a more up-close experience. We visited Byron's glacier, or at least the ice field below.
Lastly, we visited the sled dogs at Mitch Seavey's kennel. We were pulled on a wheeled sled by a team of 14 championship sled dogs. And we got to cuddle puppies. Ellie has decided that she is going to be a musher in Alaska.
