Though a history of intense claustrophobia has rendered me constitutionally ill-equipped to share in his enthusiasm for such capers, I could see why Greg was so hot to tour the Skocjan Caves, a UNESCO-protected site much hyped by the Slovenian Tourist authority. The one thing New York City lacks, beside decent Mexican food, is 6,200 advertisement-free, underground meters of naturally occurring pools, waterfalls, canyons, dripstone formations and bat breeding grounds. No doubt the children would find it educational, even if their mother backed out whimpering twenty feet in. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to stretch out on the hood of the car with a good book while the others explored this miracle of Nature.
Arriving in time for the day's final timed entry entailed hauling some serious ass on eastern Slovenia's curvy, hilly roads at breakneck speed. While Greg went off to see what he could discover about the cave's interior dimensions, I remained in the parking lot with the kids, using a moist towelette from Delta Airlines to wipe away, as best I could, all traces of the car sickness that had hijacked Inky several kilometers earlier.
"The woman in the ticket booth says you shouldn't worry," Greg reported back. "The only part that might give you trouble is right by the mouth. Speaking of which, how's the girl?"
I figured if a nine-year-old could brave the cave so shortly after losing her lunch on a narrow roadside shoulder where motorists are instructed not to pull over under any circumstances, I could handle a minute or two in the underground tunnel en route to the first soaring chamber.
The tunnel turned out to be a total cinch, at least three times wider than the entryway of the East Village tenement we lived in before Milo was born. What luck I hadn't elected to sit this one out, for Skocjan turned out to be one of those natural wonders that truly merited its thousand superlatives. "Cool, huh?" I asked, nudging the kids.
"Whoa," they agreed, gaping wide-eyed at the thousands of stalactites and stalagmites gracing the aptly named Paradise Hall.
"Told you it would be worth it," I smiled. "Now do you see why I said no when you were bugging me to stay behind on that swing set back at the Visitor's Center?"
"Yeah!" they conceded gracefully. "This is soooo cooool."
Actually, it was almost too cool. Not that I would have wanted it to be any less cool given the unexpectedly high entry fee, it's just that it didn't look quite real. I kept expecting to see a Day-Glo gnome peeking around a papier-mache toadstool, the way I would have at Disney World. Frankly, a couple of Smurfs wouldn't have hurt, at least as far as the boy was concerned.
"I'm bored," he announced, after five minutes. "Let's go."
"Are you kidding?" I demanded in a deliberately light tone, knowing that he was not. "This is so cool! You said so yourself!"
"It was cool at the beginning," he allowed, "But now it's boring."
"You'll see," I said. "It gets cooler."
"When?"
"Soon. Just a little ways up ahead. You'll see."
"I don't want to see!" he bellowed. "I! Want! To! GO!"
"Okay, okay, shh shh shh, I hear you," I whispered, hoping to avert the sort of ugly scene our fellow spelunkers might well interpret as Ugly American, juvenile division. Where the hell was Greg? A couple dozen tourists back, holding hands with our good child. "Look, Milo, we're going. We're going right now."
He looked at me suspiciously.
"What? This is the way out." It was, no lie. I just neglected to mention reaching the exit would entail at least an hour's walk. It's not like we could ditch the rest of the group to go gallivanting back the way we'd come, especially when the ranger conscientiously switched off the lights in every chamber through which we passed.
She was very thorough, that ranger, and ordinarily, I would have been quite interested in the vast quantities of site-specific science and lore she frequently paused to impart, first in English, then Serbo-Croatian. Unfortunately, I was concentrating on doling out surreptitious chunks of granola bar, the only form of hush money I had handy.
All evidence to the contrary, I couldn't quite accept that the embers of my son's earlier enthusiasm had been snuffed for good. "Ha ha! Milo! Did you hear what she called that giant rock?"
He nodded grimly. "The Giant. So what?"
"Care to take a guess why it's called that?"
"Aargghhh! Let's GO!!!"
Whose idea had it been to yank the kids out of school and drag them around the former Yugoslavia? Oh, that's right, mine. All that lip about the global classroom? How many days to go?
As we neared the end of our ninety-minute tour, I gently reminded the little mule that many of his fellow first-graders might never get the chance to explore a cave, any cave, let alone a Slovenian cave with a 135-foot high bridge, spanning a rushing underground river. "I know you're not having the greatest time, but that's something I'd like you to think about as we go through the cave."
He faced the glistening limestone wall as he considered this advice. "The only thing this cave is making me think," he said at last, taking care to enunciate every word, "is how bored it makes me."
Unlike the swing set, an experience so joyful that ours was the last car to leave the parking lot.