Live Your Life As A Theme Park

The last 9 months have been a rollercoaster ride. It's one of those rickety old ones that kind of scare the crap out of you, but you muster some courage and decide to ride it anyway. It goes slow, possibly breaks down a couple of times. It manages to whip you around enough to encourage your stomach to give up its contents. By the end of the ups and downs, you hope you never have to get on there again, it didn't seem to work very well, and to be honest it wasn't much fun.

But now, I'm off to see the rest of the theme park. There are lots of rides and sights to see. Tons are grabbing my attention. There are so many that I've never experienced before, and many others that I can't wait to feel the thrill of yet again. I've missed some of those old classics. There are some characters who I still haven't managed to catch a glimpse of and others who are new and I've never seen before.

One thing interesting about all of this, is the drastic deterioration and destruction and then construction and now renovation of my body. Since it's been 3 months since I had my surgery, I've been trying to get it to a place where it is completely functional and that I feel pleased about. I haven't been able to do much at all, and before that just didn't do much at all.

Part of me is hesitant to do certain physical activities. My left arm is still weak and my scar twinges a bit here and there. Yesterday, I proved things to myself, and probably to others! I went to the Ape Caves. They are a 13,042 feet lava tube near Mt. St. Helens. This isn't some simple hike. We had to bring headlamps, or just flashlights, to be able see at all. The floor is most definitely not flat, and there are rocks all over that you are constantly climbing over. There was one place that we had to climb up a flat surface of rock-- it really only had one foothold. I wouldn't have been able to get up it were it not for my friend Eric and some other guy to pull me up.

This picture I took at one point where we had a skylight in the cave. You wouldn't want to climb up it-its actually not allowed. But it was neat to have a moment of light and to see all the moss and stuff growing in there. The cave is year round about 42 degrees. But it was super misty in there. It was constantly dripping water on us. All of the run off from the melting snow was coming through all the cracks. I swear we saw two under ground lakes. My shoes got soaked several times. There were a few times that I would tell myself I was tired and wanted to quit, but I kept going. After a few minutes, it wouldn't be as bad as before.

Here is one look inside the cave.

This is the exit that we eventually made our way out of. A whole troop of people were standing outside of it waiting to go in when we came out. This opening is actually not quite at the end, a couple hundred feet of cave is past this. We went down there and I swear I was in the Chamber of Secrets. Remember when Harry and Ron went down the first time to rescue Ginny? The rocks came caving in and Ron and Harry were separated on either side. It definitely felt like that. At the very end of the cave, it was actually quite open. It had a cathedral ceiling and a little place to sit. I didn't want to though because a pile of Bat guana was already sitting there.

I'm still quite sore today, but I'm ok! I'm still functional and I'm excited to continue to do such things in the future. I'd love to find more strenuous hikes to explore, and I think I'm finally up for learning how to rock wall climb. The harnesses have always made me freak out. The views from yesterday, as well as the company I was keeping, was so refreshing after staring the same few walls for so many months.

Here I am in front of Mt. St. Helens. A cloud was covering the top of it the whole time, but it still was pretty crazy beautiful.

I'm excited about this brand new era in my life and can't wait to make even more adventures. Life is beautiful. In fact, sometimes it's DOUBLY beautiful.