Have you ever taken a vacation on a motorcycle?  I have and it was nuts!  My cousin, his wife and I decided we were going to take a trip up to the Ozarks and spend the week just riding around Arkansas.  We went to Blanchard Springs Caverns and then on to Harrison and spent the night.  The next day we went to Branson and Silver Dollar City.  Keeping with our spelunking theme, we went to visit Marvel Cave.

    When you go into Marvel Cave, you go down something like 300 feet.  My memory tells me that when we went in, the sun was so bright it looked like we were just walking into a gigantic black hole.  Just below ground level, when you get out of the sunlight, you see that you are standing way, way up on a huge steel stair case.  I was walking behind my cousin and his wife was in front.  We were, of course, with a large group and I was bringing up the rear.  It was at this point I discovered that my cousin was afraid of heights.  His knees were shaking so bad he had to hold on to the handrail with both hands.  This was the same guy that I had once seen riding a motorcycle while standing on the seat and holding his arms out like he was flying.  I thought he was going to collapse right there on the grating.  He kept insisting that he was about to pass out.  It took us ten minutes to get down the stairs and join the rest of the group.  Once we were on the tour going through the cave, he was back as close to normal as he ever gets.

    They had a concrete sidewalk poured through part of the cave and we were pretty much walking single file.  As we wandered along they pointed out the wonders like the Cathedral Room and a mountain of bat poop that was something like 20,000 years old.  It was wet in the cave as seems to be the norm and every once in a while there would be a pool of water along the side of the walkway.  Adding to the beauty of the cave there happened to be a young lady wearing some white short-shorts just in front of my cousin’s wife.  My cousin had a camera and every so often, he would lean around his wife and snap a picture of the girl’s butt.  Then he would turn and look at me making some stupid face, tongue hanging out and his head shaking.  There were some very dim lights along the way and his wife just thought the camera flash was one of the tour group taking pictures.  She never even turned around.

    We came to a short ladder going up about 3 or 4 feet to another level.  As the attractive young lady in front of us climbed up the ladder in a rather inadvertent provocative manner, my cousin stepped to the side to take a quick photo.  When he did, he stepped off the edge of the walkway and into a pool of guano saturated water.  It must have been a foot deep and the splashing echoed throughout the cave.  Miraculously he was in and out of the hole so fast that the only thing that got wet was me.  By the time his wife had looked around, he was completely back on the walkway and I was standing there with black water and bat crap all over my pants.  And she thought it was funny.  If only she had known what really happened.

    The week after our vacation, my cousin’s wife had their pictures developed.  About half of one roll was nothing but snapshots of an unknown derriere in tight white shorts.  Being the quick thinker that he is, my cousin explained that it must have been some of MY pictures that got mixed up with theirs.  And she BELIEVED him!  How on earth could she possibly think that some of my pictures ended up on their roll of film?   You know what?  She married him...and that explained a lot.