Summer of Caves (and a few other things)

If there’s one positive that came out of the pandemic quashing international travel plans for this summer, it’s that I had a reason to explore a few corners of the country where I actually live.  Instead of galivanting off to my beloved Iceland, I had a few domestic adventures this year.

First, I drove with my dad from North Carolina to South Dakota for a family reunion.  Along the way, we got caught in a traffic jam caused by a horse and buggy…

What it looks like to pass a horse and buggy
on a narrow country road.

…and stopped at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to test my cell phone’s ability to photograph in semi-darkness.

I think it did rather well.

There’s not much to see in Pierre, SD, aside from family, so one of the days we were there, my dad took my aunt and me out west to see Wonderland Cave.

I didn’t know I was into caves, but apparently it’s a thing I do on vacation now.

For all that Mammoth Cave was mammoth in size,
it was sadly lacking in stalactites, which
Wonderland Cave has in abundance.

We also visited Deadwood, which was less like a town and more like a Wild West theme park.  Even the restaurant we ate lunch at used to be a brothel and was proud of it!

And of course we had to stop at Wall Drug on the way back.  I don’t really know how to explain Wall Drug to people who don’t know it.  It’s a small collection of shops in a town of 800 people, but South Dakota is kind of obsessed with it.  You see signs for it on the highway for hundreds of miles before you get anywhere near Wall.  It’s famous for 5-cent coffee and free ice water.  No, I’m not joking.

Later in the summer I had the chance to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Boston.  It was the first time I’d gotten on an airplane in twenty months, and I had every intention of sleeping through the hour-and-a-half flight, but the minute the engines revved up for takeoff, I got such an adrenaline rush I just spent the whole time staring out the window at the landscape below.

Pictures of the Boston cats, because I'd turned
my phone off for the flight and couldn't
take a picture out the window.

We decided to go on a writers’ retreat while I was visiting, so most of my pictures from the trip look a lot more like a cabin in Maine than an apartment in Boston.

In spring of 2020 I learned to appreciate the woods around my own house; this summer I had the chance to go a little further afield, but I discovered the same lesson applies.  I spend most of my leisure time flying away from the place where I live.  But as it turns out, there are some pretty special places not so far from home.

Me in my natural habitat (my aunt's farm in Ohio).