Thanksgiving

Late Happy Thanksgiving to all of my readers! Hopefully you all were able to spend time with family and/or friends. I was very pleased to have the opportunity to celebrate with my family again this year. We had a great get-together at my parents house in Lexington. Per our usual tradition, my brother-in-law did a superb job cooking the turkey. We had about 20 in attendance and it was a nice mixture of my paternal and maternal relatives. The food was great and we had fun watching the kids play, as well as playing some games ourselves; Farkle was especially successful. There are some Thanksgiving pictures here.
I also had the opportunity to spend some time catching up with the friend who taught me how to play Farkle. Bea and I made a trek down to Mammoth Cave National Park. Mammoth Cave is a very large underground cave system that is also held as a National Park. Both of us had been several times as young children, but had not been back for years. We took one of the shorter tours and had a fun time. We tried taking some pictures, but were not very successful. The photos are posted here.
The tour had some interesting points. First of all, it was very exciting when they turned out the lights. Pitch black, no longer how long you wait for your eyes to adjust. Second is the fact that Mammoth Cave is still being explored. They have mapped out over 300 miles of tunnels, but are nowhere near completion. This mapping process is complicated by the fact that it takes about 12 hours to get to the uncharted region of the cave in order to start new mapping. 12 hours - that's just to get there! Factor in some exploration time and another 12 hours to hike out, and that's no small task. I don't think I would be able to do it. But the tour was great and I would love to go back for a longer tour sometime in the future.
Overall, it was a great Thanksgiving trip. When I got back to the Des Moines airport, winter had officially begun in Iowa and has not let up yet. Here's an image of my car at the airport: