After dropping our son off with his sitter for the weekend (a highly traumatic experience for the little lad until he saw the old Matchbox cars they'd hauled out of attic storage for his amusement), we went home to load our car and were off.

The trip down was very amusing for me, with my wife attempting to guess where we were headed for almost half the trip. Her first guess, Indianapolis, was discounted almost immediately when we headed south on I-75 instead of west on I-70. Successive guesses of Franklin, Middletown, Monroe (to see famous, of course) and Cincinnati were proven wrong. By the time we crossed the Ohio and headed south on I-71, she had it figured out -- we were going to Louisville.

Two and a half hours is a good distance for a trip. Going to Cincinnati was fun, but somehow anticlimactic for us, because it's so close to home. But Lousville was perfect -- not to far away, but also not too close to home.

We crashed Thursday night and went to bed. Friday morning we slept in despite attempts by a pre-set alarm clock, an ice maker, and noisy hotel staff to wake us up. We decided to go out for breakfast to the Golden Corral, but arrived to discover the place was closed and only served breakfast on weekends. So we went to Shoneys instead and were treated to typical Kentucky hospitality (grits on the breakfast bar, YEE-HAAAW!).

During breakfast, I explained to my wife that I had another surprise in store for her... we had a mysterious "tour guide" we had to meet at 2:00 who would be showing us around the Speed art museum. She tried to guess who it could be, but to no avail. The closest she came was back at the hotel, when she said, "it *could* be a RinkWorks person."

After nearly getting lost (despite my EXCELLENT sense of direction) on the way, we met Cynthia, who proved to be an accomplished tour guide, ushering us through the museum like a pro. I think we managed to change some of her opinions about the exhibits; take the Indiana Jones fireplace, or the painting of the bishop from The Princess Bride, for example.

We'll be forever grateful for the free Graeter's which I am convinced is the best ice cream known to mankind.

Cynthia's tour of the U of L campus was brief but thorough. It included the tissue box buildings, the two food places where she is willing to eat, that building with the green windows and arched entryway that her friend "wants one of," and of course her incredibly teensy tiny dorm room! Cynthia's bed is populated by stuffed animals, her walls are covered with Sarah McLachlan (did I spell that right?) and Might and Magic posters, and her computer looks just like mine.

In her post, Cynthia described eating her first jalepeno. It was in "popper" form. I took a picture of her first bite. It will be provided provided it turns out and would not cause undue embarrassment* to the involved parties. We enjoyed a staged HUGE knife fight of which I also snapped a picture.

Cynthia now knows how to play "Skip-Bo," thanks to us.

LOTR was the best film I have ever seen, and I do not regret going to see it for a moment.** My wife hated it and swore that she'd never watch it again; it gave her nightmares.

That was Friday.

Yes, on Saturday we resolved to do something romantic, alone together, since that was one of the primary goals of this Valentine's Weekend trip. So we decided to drive for an hour and a half and walk around underground for two hours with a large group of people we didn't know.

Seriously, when we went to the Gatlinburg area for our second anniversary, one of our favorite things that we did was tour the Forbidden Caverns under English Mountain. My buddy the Scotsman has been bugging me for two years to visit Mammoth Cave, and he did so again when he heard we were going to Kentucky, but I told him that it was probably too far from Louisville for it to be worth going.

So we went anyway, and it was worth it. We went on the "Historic Tour," because it was the only one left that wasn't sold out when we got there. The "Frozen Niagara" tour is supposed to be better, but we got there about five minutes before everybody piled on the buses, and even if we'd had time to run in and buy tickets, it was probably sold out too.

Any place that makes a person feel like they're inside of one of their video games (i.e., "Descent 3") is worth going to. Also, Mammoth Cave had no dead mummified dwarven bodies, no crumbling staircases of doom, no orcish hordes (besides me, but I do not constitute a horde), and I didn't see a single balrog in the place.

Most interesting thing that happened: our tour guide, joking around at the beginning of the tour, claimed to have the best rating of all the tour guides in the park, bringing out 80% of the people he took into the caves. This nearly turned out to be prophetic when approximately 20 people at the back of our group got lost when the lights went out on them. The tour guide had us wait in a rest area while he ran back to find them. About ten minutes later, he returned with five people, thinking he had everybody. Five minutes after that, while he was in the middle of his schpiel about cave bats, nine more of the missing persons stumbled out of the darkness, having found their way back to the group using three matches and a wristwatch with indiglo! Hiding his mortification quite well, the tour guide apologized profusely and then tried to go back into his bat schpiel when the tour guide of the other group ran into the room and informed him that he had found five more of our group in the dark and had taken them into his tour!

Apparently what had happened was this: when the tour started, we had such a large group of people that we were split into two sections, one of which left ten minutes after the first one. We were in the first group. Normally, each tour has two guides, one who leads the way and one who follows up in the rear, but this time only the second group had two guides, and their rear guide was inexperienced. She turned out the lights on the tail end of our group without realizing she had done so.

Exciting, especially for our tour guide whose only thought for the remainder of our cave trip was undoubtedly, "I hope they don't sue, I hope they don't sue!"

I took lots of pictures in the caves, and I'll put 'em on-line later when they're devloped.

Saturday night we watched "The Firm" in our hotel room. I'd never seen it before.

Sunday I have nothing to add, except this, for Mousie: Cynthia had spaghetti and meatballs. My wife had two slices of cheese pizza. I had a smoked turkey "Panini" or oven-baked sandwich. Our trip home was uneventful.

Gri"wanderlust sated for the time being"shny

*I reserve the right to define the term "undue embarrassment."

**Wes, if you want to taunt me about this, please do so in chat.