Perhaps the most amazing cave tour I ever gave was completely unplanned.

Martina Fierenza, the opera singer, joined me and 2 others for an evening cave tour at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park.  It was the 7 pm tour-that magical time of the evening when cave tours produce the most pleasant and unusual results.

We stopped in the “Darrow Tunnel”, that 150 ft long hallway. I demonstrated the reverberation of the rocks when singing a low bass note. Fantastic. Then I asked miss Fierenza if she’d like to sing anything. She responded so graciously and kindly.

Puccini.

I still get goosebumps just writing about it. The most amazing thing I think I’ll ever hear.

That cave tour should have cost $100 dollars each for the other couple. It was that good.

And as for Martina Fierenza?  She’s my wife, the mother of my 7 kids, and the love of my life.

At Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park, we have a really strange (and unique to this cave) animal.

3 mm long. Light pink. Claws like a scorpion. No eyes. Feelers all over its body. No stinger tail.

It’s called a Pseudoscorpion.

Sorry, you’ll never get to see one on my cave tour. Their claws are too tiny to be able to hand me the cave tour ticket.

There are those people who get angry when you tell them you shop at Walmart. But when you only have $4.00 in you pocket, it seems like the thing to do at the time.

So it was today, when my 17 yr. old son needed paper for his College Calculus class. We clicked (See:”250,000 Miles on My Subaru”) on into Walmart’s parking lot and headed straight for the school section once inside.

No ruled filler paper. Not wide. Not college ruled. Nada. Zip. Nicks-O-Rooney. Nowhere.

“How could Walmart be out of school paper?” my son asked.

“Must be a lot of educated kids these days,” I quipped.

We left, disappointed, but happy to think of all of the math problems that those missing papers represented.

Either that, or paper airplanes.

P.S. The college ruled paper from Office Depot had punched holes that don’t line up with each other. How can you NOT get holes lined up when punching them automatically with a machine? Aargh!