Vacation Day 3: Jewel Cave

 Today we went to Jewel Cave. It is the third largest cave in the world, and they aren't even through exploring it yet. They don't know how big it is.

We took the "Scenic Tour" which is an hour and a half guided tour through a certain part of the cave where they've built metal walkways and platforms and have lights.

The parts of the cave they have mapped out. They discover new passages all the time, so this map is a little outdated the tour guide said. 

Ruby waiting for out tour to start. She has awesome hair.

 Our tour guide had a sweet mid-western accent. It was fun to listen to him talk throughout the tour. We were the only family who brought five children with us on the tour. I think people thought we were slightly nuts. Haha! But the kids did really good for about the first hour. Then Ollie got a little stir crazy and wanted to touch everything (which you aren't supposed to do) and walk up all the stairs himself (there were a lot, like 700 and something). So he fought Aaron a bit. I had Rue in the Bjorn, and she got sick of that at the end too and was fussy. And the older kids did well, up until the end. We would have been great had the tour only been an hour long. But the last 20 minutes were a little rough. And it's not like we could just leave the group, because, you know, we were in a cave under the ground, and kinda had to stay with the group.

The cave was SO COOL though. I'm glad we did it. It was worth it, even with the rough 20 minutes at the end. I love caves. They are so cool. I told Aaron that we should send our kids off to boarding school so that we could join the National Spelunking Society and come be a part of the team that's exploring and mapping new passages of Jewel Cave. (Obviously, I'm only joking about the boarding school bit...but I do love caving.)

Anyways, here are some pictures of the cave. The not so good ones are the ones I took, and the rest are ones I found to give an idea of how cool the cave was.

 After the cave adventure, both Aaron and I were pretty tired. So we drove back to camp and everyone had naps/quiet time for a little while. Then then we hung out at the camp site. They had a giant jumping bubble (like a trampoline), and a play ground that they kids enjoyed.

 We decided to have an early dinner and then try to head back up to Mt Rushmore a second time to see it lit up at night.

I had made taco soup before hand and frozen it, so all we had to do was put it in the pan and heat it up. I got the fire going, got out the food, and the bowls, etc. And while I was doing that it clouded over and got windy and cold. So we had hot chocolate as well.

 I was glad we had decided to have dinner early, because as we were finishing up it started to rain a little bit. We cleaned up quickly and took all our chairs and things into the cabin. Then we got in the car and drove up to Mt. Rushmore, but it was so foggy we couldn't even see it from the parking lot. And it was raining and cold, so we decided not to even get out of the car. Instead we headed home and got to bed early (ish, it was about 9:30, which is later than the kids' normal bedtime by two hours, but so far on the vacation we haven't been getting into bed until 10:30 or so. But don't worry, Ollie woke up at 6:30 every single morning. Sigh.).