Bonus Park!!!!

Today, as you all know from our updated itinerary, we visited our tenth national park of the trip - Great Basin National Park, in Nevada. In the entire state of Nevada, this is the one area that the state saw fit to put forth as a national park. In case you haven't looked at a map of Nevada lately, there's a lot of nothing there -- in other words, a lot of prime space that could have been turned into a national park. Since Great Basin was the only area that made the cut, our expectations were somewhat high. (Well, we'd read the description of the park in our national parks book, so they weren't super high).

We started our visit to the park by trying to get a spot on a 90 minute cave tour. It turns out that the only available slot was on a 90 minute tour at 3 (which was 4 in our eyes, since the time apparently changes between Utah and Nevada) or on a 60 minute tour. So, with a mix of sadness (at having 1/3 less cave to see) and happiness (at seeing a cave) in our hearts, we committed to the 60 minute tour.

This cave - Lehman Cave - was quite different than the cave we saw at Wind Cave. However, the two did have a similarity in origin, in that they were both first publicized by enterprising sorts of folks. The person who publicized Lehman Cave initially apparently charged people for admission, despite the fact that the cave entrance was actually just outside his property lines.

Once we were inside the cave, though, we saw the differences between Lehman Cave and Wind Cave. Lehman Cave was gothic-looking, filled with stalactites and stalagmites (which gave us a chance to test our memory of the saying we'd learned from Ice Cave about which is which). Lehman Cave also has mitey-tites, where stalactites and stalagmites meet up with each other.



After the cave, we drove up to the top of the mountain in Great Basin, had lunch, and drove back down. We stopped at a few spots along the way for scenery, and then went on a short hike, where we were on the hunt for flowering cacti.



Our experience at Great Basin taught us that Nevadians have a sense of humor. On our way into the park, we were greeted by a random statue-sort of person, and another statue sort of thing that we didn't quite get, with legs sticking out of the ground. Also, jarringly, nearby there was a (fake) skull. On our way out of the park, there was a ranch exhibit, that explained that, while on their way out to CA to look for gold, people dismissed Nevada as an uninhabitable wasteland. On their way back from CA after unsuccessfully trying to find gold, they stopped in Nevada to ranch. Until we thought about them having to cross over the Badlands again to get back east, we were a bit puzzled by this. However, even after remembering this, when we looked around Nevada, we were still a little puzzled by this decision.

We also had 8 comments about Bearable Bear, Mischievous Monkey, and Not-Tigger Tiger. The paparazzi took 4 photographs of them, and we had 12 comments about the Red Sox. And only the Animal Gods know how many animal butts we've seen on this journey.

Now, we're at an airport hotel in Salt Lake City, nearly all packed up after our over 3000+ mile trek to see 10 parks, 4 national monuments, 1 national reserve, countless national forests, nine brew pubs, nine states, several random sites, and ready to head home.