In the attempt to NOT be a recluse

I am very bad at making friends, and pretty bad at keeping friends, both because I am a loner by nature and because I am also conveniently scared of people. I was actually pretty lucky to meet Hubs, considering he is also something of a loner by nature, although he is most emphatically not scared of people.

Anyway, I've been lucky enough to meet some great people through Husband. He had a large-ish crowd that he hung out with when I first started dating him, but gradually he drifted away from most of them and chose to keep his friendships only with people who were genuine friends, with whom he actually saw eye-to-eye and was not merely a convenience for.

J was one of these people. Over the last nine years, we've seen J more than anyone else, and once I got over my shyness (which only took about three years; oy), we have had some pretty good conversations, and good times. Hubs was one of J's groomsmen when J got married to a lovely lady (whom we'll also call J!), and both J and J came to our wedding just last year.

Anyway, now that the backstory has been established rather needlessly, I'll inform the world-- also rather needlessly-- that we're going camping with J and J and another of Hubs' friends this weekend!

Um. Yay!

We're going to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which sounds fabulous and which none of us has even been to. I love caves. I'd been to several in the western part of the U.S. as a kid, and I spent a wonderful few hours in Israel squeezing and edging and climbing through a small cave that was being excavated for archaeological purposes, but never anything like this!



I'm excited. I love camping. I've never really minded being a little uncomfortable because it's such an adventure to me just sleeping somewhere not in my own bed (I'm easily amused). Add to that the prospect of hiking, cave-walking, cooking over a fire, toasting marshmallows, looking up at the stars as I fall asleep...and doing all this with friends, even? HELL YEAH.

We're also going to be going geocaching a little while we're there. We looked for a few geocaches the day before our anniversary, just to see what the fuss was about, and we concluded that it was pretty fun. The caches we located were not exactly difficult to find, nor in particularly exciting locations, so maybe it wasn't quite as fun as some people think-- we agreed that it was kind of silly to look for caches just for the sake of looking (like in parking lots...), when you could be looking for them in gorgeous areas and on nice long off-the-beaten-path hikes. But! There are plenty in the Mammoth Cave area that promise to be beautiful finds, and that has fired us up again!

So all in all, it promises to be a full, fun, and rewarding experience. Only problem? We have to check in to the campsite around noon, and it's a six and a half hour drive.

Meaning...we need to leave around 5:30 am.

....let's hope the drive is the worst part of the weekend.