Rachel and I ran out to the car for sweatshirts before the tour started. Upon our return our tour guide, David, took our tickets and guided us through a turnstile. David was certainly no older than we are and probably a few years younger. I would describe David as an intelligent weenie who is bored with his summer job and so doesn’t make a lot of effort to make the tour good. Little did he know that his lack of interest made him all the more amusing to us. He grabbed his flashlight and began the tour.

"This pendulum was created tobeacompass that would tracktheearthsmovement, and itwasbuilt by highschoolstudents. There are four othersintheworld, but this is the only one thatwasbuiltunderground, and the only one that does not work." David continued to tell us about its faults as the four of us first tried to understand what he was saying and then gave up and started laughing. Now the tour group had thirty people or so but it was very obvious where the laughter was coming from. The more we tried to contain it, the louder it got.

As we entered Lassie’s cave each of us stopped in our tracks as we saw the cardboard cutout of Lassie that someone had placed in the distance. With a bright floodlight on her, Lassie was protecting the cave, and she reduced us to tears of laughter.

Next we climbed "exercise alley," so called because it was an upward-slanted cave path. At the top were an onyx mountain and a beautiful stalactite/stalagmite room that was ruined by ugly splashes of colored light. Up some more (64) stairs was the "wine room" that had grapelike formations on the walls, and a "wine table."  Look it up.

Route 66 took us through Cuba, MO, where we decided to eat lunch. We drove by a small, authentic looking diner with a sign saying EAT. Because that is what we wanted to do we went into "Rita’s Café on Route 66." We each ordered a meal for less than three dollars from Jane, who we found out was the new proprietor of this eatery. Jane was in her mid twenties and very nice in a kooky kind of way. She was rather hyper, which she explained was because she was so tired. She asked for drink orders, got distracted, and had to ask again. She gave us a look like, "What are you gonna do." After clearing up the drink thing she apologized by saying, "Short. Small Brain," describing herself. Before Rachel got too offended that Jane thought short people were dumb I explained to her that I think she meant that she had a short-term memory today so her brain didn’t work. When Baker ordered both fries and onion rings she said that she called people like that porkys. She was obviously very distracted but realized that she was entertaining us with her insanity. John, Rachel, and I left the Café and Baker stayed to go to the bathroom and take care of our $14 bill. When Baker returned we could tell that he had had another experience that he needed to report. He had accidentally gone into the kitchen while looking for the bathroom and had run into Jane. He said, "Oh, I was looking for the bathroom." Jane then retorted, "No use peein’ in the kitchen. People’ll make a fuss."

We continued on our way following old 66 which brought us into Devil's Elbow, which is where we really discovered the beauty of Missouri. Devil's Elbow was a tiny town with no center to speak of, but it did have a nice old bridge crossing a slowly flowing river. We drove over the bridge and saw a gorgeous view. Just past the bridge we decided to stop and walk back. The river was down in a canyon of sorts and the walls of the canyon were draped with luscious green vines, and the antiquity of the bridge made the whole thing beautiful. After a few minutes of gazing, the heat got the better of us and we hopped back in the van.

We spent the rest of the afternoon rolling over the foothills of the Ozarks. The valleys in the road were so pointy that once we reached the bottom of them the up side of the hill looked like a vertical wall. We avoided bottoming out the car, and successfully created many tummy butterflies and giggles.

At the end of the day we rolled into the Boots Motel, labeled in our book and the itinerary as the Booth Motel. It looked a little sketchy from the outside but the rooms were spacious and "squeaky-clean," as a sign outside said. We hopped across the road to the Bam-Boo Garden for dinner (a rather depressingly empty Asian restaurant), and got some Braum’s ice cream for dessert, which we ate in the park. We returned to our rooms, planned for tomorrow, wrote a few postcards and hit the hay.