A Trip to the Caves

First off, congrats to Kristen who won the meme off (chosen by random.org from among all 148 entries!) with this gem. I haven't laughed my ass off so hard in a good long time, guys. Gotta do this again soon because there were some AMAZING entries!!!

Sooooooooo, this weekend the hubby and I went to visit Natural Bridge Caverns, the caves they stay in in the Marriage Raffle books. I realized as my peeps were spending more and more time in the caves that my third grade memory of having gone to the caves was not really holding up and googling images was only confusing me more, lol. So I'm like, babe, how about we take a little trip down to San Antonio and go spelunking? Ya know, the really easy kind with paths and handrails and stairs, lol. So we did! And it was EPIC!

Look, it's a Natural Bridge!

It was very different than I'd been picturing in my head, so I'm gonna have to go back and do some rewrites, lol. But having such a better sense of place is awesome and so inspiring as I write the hell out of the next book.

We also went a bunch of other places where Epic Shit is gonna go down in Drea's book. The more we visited, the more ideas were popping in my head. I'd see something and be like, omg, that's the perfect spot for the bad guys to be hiding. And then Drea and her guys can run there. And they'll get out through that secret door over there!!! Oh, and that over there can explode!!! Okay, so I might have said the explode comment out loud a little too close to some tourists who were nearby and they looked at us a little freaked out before I explained, oh no, I'm just writing a book set here, I promise, I promise! Lol. Anyway, here's handsome hubby and me right outside the caves, being all adorbs (and some randos photobombing us who could not look more Texan if they tried, lmao. Actually, this whole trip made me nostalgic for Texans--they're so friendly and polite! But the heat that feels like Satan's moist burning hell breath? No, that I do not miss at all):

Here's the entryway to the cave, and one of the cave tunnels between cavern rooms.

Now when I say cavern rooms, guys, you have no idea how giant these caverns were. We couldn't get any clear pics of how big they were, our camera was shite. This was our best attempt, a pic of the cavern as we climbed up out of it. The cave is 18 stories deep. And yep, we had to climb all 18 stories. My legs are still sore, lmao.

And here's just a damn beautiful shot of the cave's innards. Did we take this picture? No, no we did not. I snagged it off the web from someone who had a way better camera than our measly phone camera. But we saw this up close and it was just as magical in person. They call it Emerald Lake.