Adventurenet.net

Hello from Austin, Texas on Tuesday August 22nd at 2pm. Weather is currently cloudy ☁️ and 98° F (36.7 ° C)

I went skydiving!

Easily one of the greatest experiences in my life, though it was not what I expected.

I was going for the rush of adrenaline like a rollercoaster, but it is not at all like this.

It was calming. Relaxing. Pure bliss, though once the parachute was deployed we were able to swing around and have some fun.

I will certainly do this again.

As for microadventures, which I will be referring to as “items from the mug list” moving forward I have received four postcards from around the world and have shipped off two to friends.

One to a pal in The Netherlands and another to the lovely hosts in Utah that we stayed with last week.

Haha, see this Timpanogos Cave card? Funny story here.

I love to visit caves and take tours of them so this visit was a must. This location is also a national park that has stickers & stamps for the passport book so it was a “double yes” for me.

What the instructions about this visit did not mention was that the 1.5 mile hike to the cave was up the side of a mountain…

Oops.

Dear James and Angeline in case you read this I would like to apologize again.

The cave tour was wonderful as expected and a new national park sticker & stamp were gathered in my passport book. (More about this later)

And then the much easier walk back down the mountain.

Let’s rewind back to the beginning of this vacation. We had a bit of an emergency at the airport after landing.

It was an early morning flight that took off around five in the morning, which meant that we needed time to arrive early to park and to get through security.

All went well here and the flight couldn’t have gone any better.

After arriving in Utah we fought to find our rental car and on the third or fourth location we visited we found someone who was able to give us the keys.

The car was a bit of a mess with little dings and scratches, but I took pictures and insurance was already added to the rental agreement so I chose to not let this bother me. As we were leaving I noted that it would be best to attach the rental car keys to our own key ring so that they wouldn’t get lost.

I felt my pocket and remembered that I had probably put our car keys in my backpack so they wouldn’t get lost.

At my wife’s suggestion I pulled over and double checked that the keys were, in fact, in my backpack.

They were not.

This was about an hour after we landed at this point due to the delays in finding the rental car and so we jumped head first into solution mode.

My wife got online and began to fill out forms while I found my way to the parking garage and ran back into the airport.

Thanks to the lovely folks at Delta we were able to secure the keys. Luckily it was very easy to describe them as 1. They were Air Tagged and 2. There was a keychain with my name on it.

The process involved me running around and asking a bunch of people for directions, speaking with a rep who called the folks at the gate, granting me a temporary pass to get through security and return to the terminal and then finally arriving at the gate again to retrieve the keys…

They were not there.

Someone was in the process of bringing them to the location I was at previously, but the attendant at the flight terminal was able to call them and they came back quickly with the keys.

Whew.

It was a great vacation week. We saw Jiu Jitsu.

We visited waterfalls.

We visited several museums including a sports museum.

A natural history museum.

A planetarium.

Another national park, this one with a steam engine train.

Also of note, at this park I discovered that the stickers/stamps for national park passports are more varied than I initially thought.

I have upgraded to one of the larger passport books, but now I must revisit the LBJ location to gather the sticker and stamps again.

Also of note were our dog friends at the home we were welcomed into.

Spider friends, too. (This is Bob).

Also there was this bicycle. It moved every few days and at one point had a visiting scooter friend.

It sometimes wore a jacket to keep warm and it sometimes laid on its side to rest, but it was always here at this park.

There was also an intentional hike into the mountains, unlike the cave visit.

We did many things and I brought back an extra backpack filled with goodies from this visit including over 100 new postcards, several RPG books and loads of national park & museum memorabilia.

Thank you again to our lovely hosts as this vacation would have been far more difficult and expensive without your help.

We had an amazing time and there’s a ton that I left out including a strange idea that I’m tinkering with which is to take pictures of water towers and then something something. Not sure, yet.

Keanu is happy that we’re back home, though she would never admit it. Also she says “Hi.”