A few weeks ago the wife and I went on a weekend trip to Mystery Cave in Southern Minnesota. Figured I'd post up some pics and a short report.
Link to some info on the Cave -
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/forestville_mystery_cave/index.htmlThe plan was to arrive at our hotel in Spring Valley, about 15 minutes from the park, in the early afternoon, hit one of the afternoon tours and just hang out at the park that evening, spend the night, and find some fun roads on the way home Sunday morning.
We started off from our house in White Bear Lake Saturday morning and took a slight detour over into Wisconsin to hit some twisties on the way down. Here is a general shot of the route we took.
Didn't take a whole lot of pics on the way down, the roads and the weather were too nice and I kind of forgot
. Managed to grab a few when we stopped to stretch and use the facilities at this hotel just south of Rochester though.
We made it to our hotel in Spring Valley a couple hours early and decided to head over to the A&W across the street to grab some lunch.
Obligatory food photo
After we ate we checked into our hotel, unloaded the bikes, and got ready to leave for the park for our cave tour.
Everything seemed to be going to plan. The hotel was 15 miles away from the Park. About half way to the caves, we turned onto the road the Park was on. It was dirt. Not a big deal for me as I have a good bit of dirt/offroad experience, however, my wife was less than impressed and inexperienced with dirt. After about a half a mile, and 5 or so more to go, I realized if we kept going I'd probably have to get a separate hotel room for myself that night. I made the decision to turn around and maybe see if there was another way to the Park. We ended up riding back to the hotel and long story short, there was another way, but it still was 2 miles of dirt to get there. By now there was no way were going to make the last tour of the day and it had started raining pretty hard. We decided to call it a day and hit the early morning tour the next day.
Managed to find some undercover parking once the rain started.
Luckily, there was a grocery store and a mini mart next to the hotel and we gathered some food and a deck of cards and hung out at the hotel for the rest of the night.
While unloading some of our clothes in the hotel room that evening we found a present our son had stuck in our luggage before we left.
Brought a smile and made up for some of the headaches we had gone through earlier
The next morning we decided we'd ride two up to the cave since the wife still wasn't comfortable tackling the dirt. We made it with zero issues and were even a half hour early!
The park was really nice and since we made it to the earliest tour of the day, there weren't many people.
Entering the cave
The cave was very interesting, and the tour was very informative. We had chosen a pretty easy going tour that lasted about an hour and did not have any "caving" involved. Here are a few highlight pics from inside.
After the tour it was time to check out from the hotel and head back home.
Since we hadn't planned on being at the cave that morning, we were running late and decided to just slab it back home
This was our first overnight trip on the bikes together and it went pretty well and was a lot of fun. Already looking forward to the next one.
Home sweet home.
