Caving Spring '08

So last Thursday we rounded up the Girl Scouts and headed out to good ol' West VA for the Spring caving trip. Much fun all around. This was the first trip I was officially a solo female adult -- the last few trips I've been paired with another newer / less confident adult woman (each group tries to have both a man and a woman adult, along with a junior staff high school girl). But this trip it was just me, one of the guys, and my junior staff... and I was the driver for the group! Craziness. I'm not that old yet. :P Though I ended up recruiting another adult my age to help out with some group issues. Diffusion of personality clashes is always good. And Mom did remind to bring Garmy (my Garmin; yes, I know I am bad at naming things), so I have the schoolhouse, the showers, and two caves plotted into GPS. Take that, sucky directions! I am satellite linked! boo-yah!

You will understand my frustration at the directions we have to the caves if you have ever been out to WV. Most directions are "turn at the Uncle Sam mailbox," or "on the other side of the mountain" anyway, but when you leave town and head for the hills it gets real bad real fast. Case in point: one summer trip we were looking for the "blue building" to turn at according to the directions. Little did we know that since the directions were written, the building had faded to grey AND had been overgrown with flowering vines. We could hardly see the damn thing and drove past it like three times!! grrr....

You and the cow... that's all that's out there

ANYhoo... random anger over, I can say we had a pretty good group this trip. We are becoming strangely bottom-heavy in our experience levels among the girls. Usually, there's one or two groups of Rookies, a Second-Timer group, a Has-Been group, and a group of high schoolers who are being evaluated to be junior staff. But this time, there were two groups each of Rookies and Second Timers, and Group 5 (which is usualy pretty advanced) was only Third Timers! And the high school group was definitely not mature enough for junior staff. Good to have new people joining up, but very weird when everyone is so new and inexperienced.

Da high-schoolers

I had the smallest group, just three Second Timers, and we took then to Fox and Snedegars caves. On Friday, they were the most not-wanting-to-go-down-small-areas group I've ever had! And by "small holes," I mean anything that you can't stand fully upright in. They even tried to convince me they couldn't go down a passage... when it was the way out! They had already come up that passage that morning, but a few hours later it was too small. Goodness! So, to break them of their whining, on Saturday we shoved them down every small crawl we could find. mwahahahaha They were so tired of army crawling by lunch, but we kept at it to show them what was physically possible and what was just them being lazy. The standard rule is that if your helmet fits, you can fit, 'cuz the body is mostly squishy and bendy, but your helmet is definitely not. It's just soft tissue, girls, move it out of the way! :)

I also was excited this trip because [drumroll please] I HAVE COVERALLS THAT FIT ME!! woot! It's very exciting. All my previous coveralls were made for fat & short people (I swear, one pair is a 46Short) But now I have a 36 and a 38! Woot woot! So, now that I have fitting coveralls, what do I do but rip them... twice. :( So yesterday I went to the fabric store and got some rip-stop nylon to mend holes and reinforce knees and rump. Now that I have the proper size, I am determined to keep them in as good a condition as possible!