Dinosaurs and Mammoths (by Sunshine)

Will our ball reach the end and raise the flag?

Indianapolis was an ideal place to begin our journey because we could get an inexpensive hotel with a pool near family friendly attractions. Our first stop was an interactive history park called Conner Prairie. Even with all the outdoor attractions closed there was more than enough indoor activity to entertain us for several hours. Walden loved the environmentally conscious play area where he could build his own fort, climb a tower, play store, create stories with a puppet farm, and drop balls down tubes. Most enjoyable was the Create.Connect experience area with opportunities to build and test our own windmill, make circuits to turn on lights and buzzers, and connect motion machines to develop Rube Goldberg type challenges. The fact that all three of us were entertained for a long time working together to design and build a machine speaks volumes for the high quality design of the exhibit (or our sheer stubbornness to make it work!).

Walden was sure to ask the museum educator
if any of the dinosaurs were alive.

Serendipity...One evening per month the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is free from 4-8 pm. We happened to be in town that evening and couldn't pass up the opportunity to visit the world’s largest children’s museum. Normal admission for the three of us would have been over $60! You have to see this place to believe it. It is more like an indoor entertainment park/science museum for all ages than children’s museum. Walden’s favorites were the Dinosphere (complete dinosaur skeletons under dome with weather and light effects), the water play area, ball tubes, a wind tunnel with scarves, and a full sized carousel. We left wishing we had more time to explore but also completely exhausted and ready to collapse. More Indianapolis photos

After two nights in Indianapolis, we finally headed south to Cave City. We booked another hotel since overnight temperatures were still in the teens. Cave City is an area just off the Interstate crammed with hotels, fast food joints, and tacky tourist shops that one has come to expect just outside the boundary of beautiful natural spaces like Mammoth Cave National Park. We arrived two days after a record snowfall and the area looked like a ghost town. Our fingers were crossed in hopes that the park would reopen in the morning after being closed for the storm. Dinner was soup heated in our hotel microwave and the evening's entertainment was an awesome family dance party and pillow fight (Walden’s first) while jumping on our hotel beds. 

We made it!

Mammoth Cave was open and both Jim and I were excited to take Walden on his first cave exploration. We chose to do the two-hour two-mile historic tour because it went through the largest and most open areas of the cave. We thought this would reduce any fears Walden might experience. He was a trooper and walked a large portion of the trail and stairs by himself. He loved looking for the source of the lights next to the trail and announced the color of the bulbs in each one to everyone near us. He desperately wanted to see bats but sadly the cave population has been hit by white nose syndrome and most of the resident bats were hiding or dead (caves with white nose lose up to 90% of their population while the fungus runs its course). Walden very much enjoyed getting to walk across the soapy mats after the tour that would kill any spores on our shoes and prevent the spread of the fungus to other areas.

When we finished our tour Walden asked “Where are the stalactites?” We explained that only one small part of Mammoth Cave has moving water that creates formations and we were not in that part of the cave. We debated whether he would last through another tour to see the formations while eating a lunch in the visitor center. How could we pass up the opportunity, right? So off we went for another two hour tour. This one included a bus ride to and from a different entrance, many steps, wet walkways, low and narrow passages. Walden loved it all! It was a wonderful day.