Weekend at the Lake!

Charlie invited a group of us up to his parents lake house up in the Tennessee mountains for a fun weekend out of the city! Klar picked me up late on Friday and we met Charlie, Sarah, and Dana up at the cabin.

We spent all of Saturday out on the lake. Charlie is a fricken pro at wake boarding and Dana is pretty dang good too, but Klar, Sarah, and I were all beginners. After Charlie showed off his awesome turns and flips and Dana attempted some sweet moves, it was the beginners time to learn.

It took Sarah a couple of times, but before we knew it she could stand up everytime and then entertain us with her awesome falls.

I was up next and after a couple times of being plowed through the water, I stood up on the board and was riding! It was hard to figure out how to maneuver over the wake without eating it, but minus the probable whiplash - I had a blast.

Klar was next and unfortunately he didn't have much luck standing up, but got frustratingly close a bunch of times!

We made sure to all take turns at the huge rope swing in between wake boarding and eventually we head back in for the night and grilled some up some food to have with our margaritas.

The next day we played around on the jet skis (my first time!) and I realized that I'm not a huge fan of going fast as hell on them...but, a bit of fear makes it all the more fun! :)

Virgins, Concerts, Shamu, and Squirt Guns in Caves!

Friday after work, we packed up two cars with camping and caving gear and set off to the Cumberland Caverns in Tennessee. Not long after arriving and setting up camp (Cumberland Caverns rocks and allows us cavers to camp there for free!), I get the usual I'm lost call from Dana and somehow direct her along the foggy roads to our campsite. We get a little roudy as usual with our 2 handles of Soco (Dana and I think alike) and Sean's obligatory bottle of 2 buck chuck.

The next morning we woke up and headed to a small cave in the area called Cave of the Virgins. I'm still not sure that this cave actually qualifies for vertical status, but nonetheless we set up a rope and rappelled into the VERY tight entrance. The cave was pretty small, but decently decorated and we spent about an hour exploring with everyone rappelling and climbing on out. Getting out the cave was interesting and I just got frustrated as my gear got in the way and some people REALLY struggled to get out.

More of our friends had arrived when we were in the cave and the parking lot for Cumberland Caverns had filled up. The group of us showed our pre-purchased tickets and we were led down the path to the cave entrance. Cumberland Caverns is a very touristy cave and the passages leading to the main room were well lit and all of us cavers looked for tiny side passages that we debated crawling off into. Most of the seats were already taken, so we awkwardly found places to sit on a pile of rocks off to the side and waited for the magical cave bluegrass to start. A concert inside of a cave? Awesome idea as the acoustics made the fiddles and twangy singing sound ethereal.

Post-concert we piled in our various cars and set out for Snail Shell, where we would camp for the night. chili, hobo meals, and bottles of wine put us to sleep this night (after Sean's drunk dialing antics and Lisa's epic first pee in the woods).

A few more friends joined our group the next morning and we all donned our wetsuits and either hiked or rappelled our various flotation devices down to the cave. There were several kayaks, a dingy, 2 intertubes, a pool lounge chair, and Shamu.

Sarah and I grabbed our oars and paddled our little inflatable dingy on into the cave. I think the paddle upstream is about a mile, at which point all of us but Dana deserted our respective floatation devices and preceded into the cave by foot. Dana was determined to use her River Rat raft (1 of the 2 that had survived Puerto Rico) for as long as possible, and this eventually led to its demise.

We hiked on in for a while, having to occasionally swim...but, all too soon we had to head back out of the cave and on the road back to the ATL.

Wrecking our way through Nashville

AK, Jon (my amazing couchsurfer who now lives in Germany) and I took off early on Saturday morning for Nashville, TN. I had planned the trip about a month before because the NCAA Gymnastics Nationals was being held up there and to top it off one of my best friends Dana was working at her first grown up job up there as well. Jon was trying to make it up to his brother's place in West Virginia so we offered him a ride up there with us.

We met up with Dana and the new boy she was dating and grabbed a bite to eat along with the restaurant's make your own bloody mary bar. Well 3 of us went and watched the Georgia Bulldogs grab their 5th consecutive NCAA title...even though I'm a yellow jacket at heart, I feel compelled to root for the Georgia Gym Dogs since they're the only Division 1 team in Georgia and one of their Olympic athletes had helped choreograph a couple of my girl's floor routines.

After the meet we met up with Jon and Ben, the new boy and all went to grab a bite at a local Indian restaurant and then the 5 of us headed out to the bars in East Nashville. Jon decided that he would be the DD for the night and we spent the next couple hours hopping from bar to bar, to taco stand, to bar.

Deciding we had had enough for the night, we all piled into Ben's car with Jon in the drivers seat. At night in downtown Nashville, the main road's lights all turn to flashing yellow and all of the streets that cross have flashing red lights. We were driving along the main road with flashing yellows when another car decided that they weren't going to even slow down for their flashing red and came flying into the intersection...there wasn't even enough time for somebody to get out an, "Oh, shit" before we T-boned the other vehicle. Because I was sitting in the middle seat in the back, which thankfully actually had a shoulder strap I didn't see the accident coming - only had felt the screech of our breaks and Jon tried to avoid the hit, felt the painful crunching crash and then saw the smoke coming up out of our engine. The 4 of us quickly bolted from the car, nervous that smoke might mean fire or explosion that you see in the movies.

The other car had spun out after we had T-boned it and had landed half on a curb. The driver of the other car emerged, screaming accusingly at us for hitting her car. We informed her that it had in fact been her that had a run a red light and her mad screaming turned into a repitition of, "I did NOT run a red light, I did NOT run a red light". There were 4 people total in her car, one who had not been buckled as was displayed by her head sized dent in the front windshield...I think she ended up being ok.

Between the 5 of us we did a quick survey of eachother to make sure all of us were alright. My neck and everyone else's was starting to ache a little from whiplash and a couple minutes later Jon showed us his hand and his knuckle had swollen up like crazy - it ws definitely broken. I'm sure he was so grateful to be our designated driver. The cops showed up shortly after and questioned all of us separately and for some unknown reason they decided not to breathalize the driver of the other car even though everyone in that car was dressed in clubbing clothes and it was pretty apparent to us that she had been drinking....seriously? I feel like any accident that happens around 2 am should require that both drivers be breathalized!

All 4 of the girls from the other car were taken to the hospital on stretchers even though 1 refused to put her cell phone down even when they were rolling her onto the ambulence with a neck brace on. I do honestly hope the girls were physically ok, they obviously were not so mentally competent as they later tried to sue. All 5 of us had refused medical service and we spent at least another hour waiting on the tow truck to come pick up the car and the police to finally stop questioning us and leave. Funny how the accident wasn't our fault at all and we were left stranded on the side of the road until Dana got a hold of her friend to come pick us up at what was now like 4 in the morning.

The previous night had obviously been pretty eventful, but we didn't get much chance to sleep in the next morning as we were meeting up with a caving friend of mine - David at a cave called Indian Grave Point in the middle of nowhere Tennessee. The owner of the cave is extremely friendly to cavers and has some nice parking spots for us on the side of the road and has built a small fence so that you can cross over the barbed wire that surrounds him farmland to access the cave. Once crossing the fence, you hike around a cow dung infested pond and straight up the hill - avoiding more cow patties along the way. The cave entrance itself is a pretty large sinkhole that you can scramble down and then enter the chilly air of the cave - that had a smell of rot about it this particular day.

I absolutely love caving and am built small and agile which greatly helps me get around in caves and I went happily tromping ahead, leading us into the cave and doing my best to ignore the awful smell. From behind me I hear a loud, "Gross!" Jon had discovered the source of the smell - a rotting, bloated goat corpse - yuck!!!! Jon and Ben were all entertained by the dead, rotting corpse and preceded to take pictures in front of it, while the other 3 of us hiked as quickly as possible on past the goat and deeper into the cave to get away from the stench.

I had been in this cave once before and its got so big passages and chambers as well as some fun muddy crawl spaces that I of course wormed my way through whenever possible. There is a particularly "special" chamber with a particularly "welcoming" women is spraypainted on the wall. The 6 of us wandered up, down and around through the cave and eventually came upon the cave guest book which is surrounded by many interesting toys and a dorito was some funky mold on it. We signed our names and crawled up and down several more dark and muddy passages before making our way back to the entrance which was grossly apparent due to the odor of dead goat.

After a fun day and interesting weekend in whole we all headed our respective ways - Atlanta, Nashville, and West Virginia.