A day trip adventure awaits us.
Locate last season's sunscreen,
shake two mostly-empty cans.
Phew! Enough for three pale people.
Find our spring-weight sweaters
and ball caps
and polarized shades
and good walking shoes.
Chunk ice into each Yeti bottle;
fill cool water to the brim.
Requisition mandarins, popcorn,
electrolytes, almonds, stealth cookies.
Load up the car, yell for passengers;
buckle up, back out,
close garage, haul out of the hood.
And we're off!
Stop for a morning treat
on the way out of town,
that nice French cafe
she likes and always asks to visit.
She wants a tuna sandwich
with sweet herb tea and
a walnut brownie;
fine okay!
I want lamb meatball shakshuka
and a pistachio latte,
and he takes morning air
while we wait for our order.
We hit the highway,
carryout in tow,
Southwest to
the Shenandoah Valley.
Brilliant sun illuminates
our dash and windows.
Puffy clouds sail through
egg-blue skies; Spring Break vibes.
Crawl our way around the city,
past the sprawl, into the country.
High rises transition to treelines
which grow into mountain ranges.
Budding April trees and new blooms
chortle in color from hillsides
and the shoulders of roadways:
Blurs of cotton candy pink,
Peep yellow of goldenrods,
Eastern Redbud magenta and
Key lime foliage drown our views.
Red barns, siloes, historical lodges
and hay bales dot the scenery.
Black cows sit in shallow ponds.
Song birds flutter, vultures circle.
A couple hours from D.C. and we
already feel a million light years away.
We turn off the main road into
a complex, teased for miles as:
'the largest cavern in the East!'
We don outer layers, head inside.
We pass through two sets
of containment doors and then,
there we are, in Luray Caverns!
Stalactites and stalagmites abound.
It's damp, the ground is slick.
The air smells sulphurous:
"Did someone fart?!"
She asks with a disgusted thrill.
The narrow path is crowded
it's Spring Break for many others, too.
Our trio navigates the slippery path
through the bowels of the Earth.
We bump into other humans
(but not the walls, never the cave walls).
In petty thoughts, I deem those
travelers' banter — and gaits —
to be self-unaware.
One father figure tells his brood:
"Here kids, touch this, it feels weird!"
(No please don't, really)
A woman in jeans and sick kicks says:
"So, now, girls, lean on this formation
so I can snap a pic!"
"Okay, mom!" they respond in unison.
A man in a Gulf of America tee orders:
"Boys, drop this dollar in the pool.
It's supposed to be good luck!"
Meanwhile, my own family
has sprung racing legs, they weave
in and out of tottering crowds, each
on a quest for a personal best lap time.
Left to my own devices,
I sigh and make the best of it.
I attempt to capture a video pan
of a mirror-like lake, a moment of calm.
My brief zen is quickly shattered
by a herd of elementary-aged boys
shouting and pointing at the water:
"That's AI!"
"That's AI!"
"THAT IS AI!!!"
"Bruh!!!! AI!!!!!!"
All, of course, at top volumes.
Two women ahead of me:
"Shelly says she's claustrophobic
but she loves this place.
I can't imagine!"
The second one nods:
"Right? It's so dark and cramped in here!"
(I had felt fine until then —.)
I do that suburban white lady thing:
"Ope! 'scuse me,
I'm gonna scoot right by you!"
And then I continue threading
my six-foot frame through the throngs
until I catch up with my speedy duo.
After our sprint through the caverns
we find ourselves fending off
the souvenir photo stand sales people:
"No thanks!" he and I say in tandem.
The irony is, it was a great pic of us, rare.
I whisper inwardly a mantra to stay firm:
Swedish Death Cleaning. Spark joy.
Leave No Burden Behind!
This place has truly
maximized its
captive audience
monetization strategies.
We wend our way through:
an enormous gift shop
a toy museum attached to a cafe
a car museum attached to
yet another sundries and doodads market
and terminate in a fudge store.
(He falls for it; she gets him to
buy four sickly-sweet slices).
Back outside, we regain our defenses.
We pass by the zip line
and ropes course.
We ignore the hedge maze.
We look beyond the
"primitive outbuilding settlement"
(whatever that is, we won't find out)
to retrieve our "free gem stone"
from a historical museum
of Early American daily life.
At the gem shoppe, we are
repeatedly prodded to
"Buy a gem sack for a dollar off!"
Which we decline, thrice.
Free gem in hand,
we make our way back to the car
as sweat beads form, right before
a gentle breeze wick them away.
We make a mid-point stop for lunch
followed by a re-fuel and a slurpee run.
After a few Tom Petty songs we are
back on familiar roads:
tall buildings and malls of the DMV.
We teleported to subterranean caves;
now we're in the air conditioned burbs.
The immense stimuli in between?
It's all in the magic of a Day Trip.
