A Summer To Remember

'Twas the night before school starts, and what did we do?
We recovered from boating and spelunking, too.
The children are nestled all snug in their beds
As visions of a river and caves dance in their heads.

Happy Labor Day, everyone! We've spent a lot of this week trying to get through the last of our boxes that are sitting out in the house. We may be able to park at least one car in the garage sometime this week, and the front sitting room may actually be used for sitting in the next couple of days.

Sunday we spent the day on the Willamette (rhymes with 'dammit') River with a co-worker/friend of my husband's. He has a fun boat and offered to take us for a spin on what turned out to be one of the hottest days this weekend (again, by Pacific NW terms). My husband and I are from lake country in the Midwest, but are woefully lacking in the recreational boating department. I tried water skiing once back in high school. One self-inflicted enema later, I hung up my water skiing career. Since then, we (or maybe just I) mostly have partaken in the more leisurely, less emotionally-scarring forms of water sports--fishing and tubing. So when my hubby forwarded an e-mail from his co-worker listing such things as wake boards, wake surfing, and something called "skates", you can imagine the gruesome flashbacks that came to mind and subsequent panic.

I'm happy to report that even though I may not have spent a lot of time upright on the wake surfing board, I did get up and out of the water, my bottom and all. As is the plight of many moms out there though, there are no pictures of myself doing it, so you'll just have to take my word. My husband had a successful go at it and even my daughter gave wake boarding a try. All-in-all, it was a sun-drenched, adrenaline-pumping, laughter-filled afternoon. A big thank you to K.L. and his daughter for being so generous and showing us how to enjoy the Willamette.

I woke up Monday morning to the aches and pains of arm and leg muscles that haven't been used like that in many, many years. There are areas of my armpits I did not realize had individual muscles until now. In spite of that, we were game to get in one more adventure on the last day of summer vacation and headed north to the Ape Caves next to Mt. St. Helens. They are old lava tubes formed about 1,900 years ago in a rare lava eruption from the volcano. Most of the volcanoes in the Cascade Mountain range that runs along the west coast only give large, explosive, ashy eruptions because of the amount of silica in the ground here, but thanks to a blip in history (or someone who didn't read the memo), we were able to try our hand at spelunking for the first time.

If you ever get the chance to go cave exploring, bring long pants, a thick sweatshirt, and an ample light source. It was 88 F at the mouth of the cave and quickly plunged to 44 F by the time we made the short trip down the staircase to the cave floor. My husband and I have the tendency to try and forge ahead on outings even if we've forgotten a few key supplies back in the van or at home. Five minutes into our first attempt at the hike, we were tripping and shivering along because we forgot to change the kids into the warm clothes we left the van and had left the large flashlight on the kitchen counter at home. We put our pride aside turned around and started over from the parking lot once more. This time, we were properly attired with our jogging headlamp in position and our rented Coleman lantern in hand. And oh boy, am I glad we decided to spring for the lantern.

It's dark. As in can't-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark. There are no lights wired down in these caves, and as busy as it was on Labor Day, there were still times when we couldn't see the lamps of the people in front of us or behind us and it was just us four trying to stay within the lit circle of our lantern and headlamp. The ceiling of the cave is at least 20-30 feet high in most parts of the cave, thank goodness, so my claustrophobic tendencies didn't really bother me much. The kids were incredibly well-behaved and maintained a brave face for almost the entire time. It wasn't until we started the trickier ascent back up the lava tube and had to concentrate even more on our footing that kisses on scraped hands and piggyback rides were necessary.

We trekked for an hour round-trip and came back up into the warm sunlight again just in time as my claustrophobia was becoming directly proportional to how fatigued I was. A no-brainer, we had chosen to take the lower "easy" cave hike which was only 3/4 of a mile long instead of the upper "difficult" cave hike which is 1 1/2 miles uphill over large boulders and an 8 foot lava wall that has to be scaled. The kids didn't think it sounded all that difficult, but then again, they weren't walking the entire way, either.

Another summer vacation in the books tonight, I hope all goes well for my daughter at her new school tomorrow. Fingers crossed that she saved some of her bravado for the rest of the week to come. Here's a little video of our spelunking adventure to remember our Labor Day Weekend.

~Paula