Today was the day I was kind of dreading. Today was zip line day — Madeline‘s number one choice activity for this trip. We‘re both still alive, so I would say it was a success.
There‘s this place in town, Louisville Mega Cavern, not far from downtown and right behind the zoo, where there is an old limestone mine. Some enterprising person decided to make a tourist attraction out of it. They have a zip line (of course), a ropes course, tram tours, bicycle tours, and a holiday lights show around Christmastime. I don‘t really remember how we heard about it, but it was at the top of Madeline‘s to-do-in-Louisville list, so I got us reservations.
Madeline has joined her school track team, and she has some required running to do over Spring Break, and I decided to run with her. We set an alarm to get us up, got ready to head out, and went to the nearby Riverside Park to run. We drove there to save a little time and so that we could head right to the cavern when we finished. The park was nice but the area between the two highway bridges smelled heavily of diesel fuel. Still, it was a beautiful morning to run outside.
We grabbed breakfast at a Starbucks on the way to the cavern and made it with about 15 minutes to spare. Our tour time was 10:30, but we were instructed to arrive by 10:00, and we got there at 9:45. The facility didn‘t open until 10, so we finished our breakfasts in the car while we waited. After checking in we had to wait a bit, and the tour started about ten minutes later than scheduled. Then, we met our guides, Dustin and Lucy, and went into a back room to gear up.
Soon we were walking through the cave, and we arrived at “The Zip Line to Hell,” which is pictured in the photo at the top of this post. It was not too long and not too high. Nevertheless, every time I zip, I have to take a deep breath before stepping off the platform. Our group had about 20 people including the two guides, and so there was a lot of waiting while each person got hooked on, zipped, and then got unhooked.
The second zip included a short ramp you had to walk down before stepping off, which somehow made it a lot scarier. One young girl was really scared, but at her mom’s urging she did it. Unfortunately, she decided she didn’t want to do anymore after that, and a car came to pick them up and take them back to the Visitor Center. We continued on and had one more child and parent drop out before it was over. It really just got scarier as we went, but I managed to come up with the courage to do it every time.
My two scariest parts were not zips. One was a suspension bridge, shorter than a football field but not by much. It went over a huge cavern. I did not look down the entire way, but I could just feel the huge nothingness around me. I just focused on keeping my legs moving! The other one involved getting unhooked from a line at the end of a zip. We had to step up on a step at the very edge of a platform with nothing behind us but air. There was a rope that we could hold on to, and I was white knuckling that thing like crazy! Dustin did a good job of keeping me calm while quickly and efficiently getting me unhooked. I knew, logically, that I was never in any real danger, because I was always strapped on by at least one hook. But my central nervous system didn’t care! The adrenaline was kicking in.
The last zip was side-by-side (separated by at least ten feet) lines where you could race the person next to you. I beat Madeline! She says it was not fair because I weigh a lot more, but I also curled myself up into as tight of a ball as I could so that I didn’t have much wind resistance. I was perfectly happy to be back on the ground again.
While we were waiting in the morning, we saw their underground ropes course, and Madeline wanted to do it, so we signed up for a session of that for her only. I was done with being up in the air for a while. We had about 90 minutes to kill, so we left and grabbed some lunch then went back to the cavern. She got a full two hours on the ropes course and really had fun.
By the time we left the cavern it was after 5 pm. We headed back to the hotel to relax for a short while, then walked a block to have dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory and turned in for the night. Madeline is in the shower now, because we’re getting up early to run before our spa appointments! I’m looking forward to a relaxing day tomorrow.