Rachel's birthday continues

On Saturday, we all decided to explore Luray Caverns, an extensive series of underground rooms in the Shenandoah Valley. Walking through them takes an hour, and admission includes a visit to a rope-climbing course where you get harnessed in, a garden maze, and there's a toy museum and a car-and-carriage museum. Pretty cool all around, even if it is a tourist trap -- we'd been told the caverns were a good day trip.

Took us about 2 hours to get there, and it was definitely worth the trip! The caverns are really incredible -- rooms and rooms of impressive stalactites and stalagmites, and weddings take place there. There's also a pipe organ, and when it's played the echoes are eerie but beautiful. I've never seen anyplace like it, not in all the traveling I've done. The closest thing to it is New Zealand's glowworm caves that Drew and I admired while we were there on our delayed honeymoon.

Afterward, we went through the garden maze, which was pretty but unexpectedly difficult. PopPop left to go to one of the museums on site, and Drew and I finished the course -- much to Rachel's chagrin, who tearfully asked Drew to take her to the final two "goals" (there are four "goals" throughout the maze; you get a ticket and each goal has a stamp, and when you stamp your ticket four times you get 15 percent off the merchandise at the maze store. Rachel found the first two easily but was stumped by the last two, and Drew had to help her).

THEN we all went through the rope course, similar to a zipline that Rachel, Drew and I went to in the  foothills of the Alleghenies back in 2013, just after we'd moved here. She was so matter-of-fact about the rope course; just used her harness to walk back and forth on the shaky tightropes and walkways that scared the bejesus out of me, and so I finally worked up the courage to walk on the tightrope part, which was really scary, and when I finished Rachel announced, "I'm going to do it 10 times." And, bless her heart, she did. The whole experience was a lot of fun.

We took a quick spin through the toy museum -- long enough for me to note that American Girl dolls were first manufactured in 1986 -- and then tried to eat dinner in Luray but were stymied. So we went to Front Royal and found a great little burger and frozen custard place called Spelunker's. By then we were starving so I wasn't going to be picky about finding a nice place to eat for Rachel's actual birthday. We had burgers and frozen custard in waffle cones -- the custard is better than the one at FDB, a restaurant in Arlington we discovered a few weeks ago -- and were fairly close to home at that point (only 90 minutes), so it was a good stop and a great end to Rachel's birthday excursion. She's 7. SEVEN! How did that happen?!?!?!