DAY 2

This sign must be really clear to someone?





And we’re still in Flagstaff . . . I had anticipated being much further up the road. You all know that the Phoenix cop is our good friend Mike. He’s such a good sport.

Today we went to the Volcanic Tubes. Wow what an incredible cave, and we’ve been to many caves. If you’re ever in the Flagstaff area you need to go see the Volcanic Tubes. It’s a 2 mile hike into the tube and back out, but it’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. Someone told us last year to go check them out and we’re so glad we did. The cave is not well marked and if it weren’t for Eric our hotel front desk guy we would never have found it. He gave us the mile marker number and instructed us to take a turn just after it down a small non marked dirt road. It didn’t look good to me at all . . . I was thinking we’d be lost forever, and I was convinced that we took the wrong turn. When we arrive in the parking lot it was just a small dirt lot with two other cars. I visualized us being chopped up into little pieces by some cave dweller. Fortunately another family drove up just after us and was kind enough to show us to the cave entrance NEVER would have found it. I’m not sure the people in Flagstaff want you to go visit this cave because there isn’t one sign. Most of the caves we’ve visited have nice paved paths, complete cave lighting SO YOU CAN SEE! and some kind of National Park Ranger. NOT this cave! You have to climb over slippery boulders down into this cave in the DARK . . . we were told to bring 3 flashlights each. Once you get past the large slippery boulders the cave opens up into a huge lava tube and it’s really dark but incredibly cool. Some points we had to crawl on our bellies . . . not a huge fan of that. Cole and Jacquelyn ran off with some new friends and made it to the end and I don’t think we saw them again until the way back. We slipped a few times banged our heads a few times and have one scrape but we made it there and back and we all highly recommend the Lava Tubes!
We were done by noon and headed off to Walnut Canyon.