Stalactites,Stalagmites, Catfishes & Spotted bass;-)

I know the title doesn't make any sense - like my previous weekends !! Most of my weekends were wasted either worrying abt some escalations of that week or worrying abt meeting preps for the coming week ... The worst scenario being @ the receiving end when you clearly know that you donot have direct control over the situation , but that is called team work ;backing up your team eventhough that means you being christened a "bad boy " ;-)

Lets get to the fun part - I wanted to enjoy the outdoors this long weekend , as most of the times I was dungeoning in my single bedroom apartment..So Sunday morning we (two married couples + myself an odd man out) drove to a place called crystal caves - its abt 1:30 hr drive from our place.. We had a tour of the cave and the story in short - a brother-pair accidentally discovered its existence in 1881 and then later it was commercialized by a OOB-thinking entrepreuner in 1941.. The cave has three levels and is well maintained (obviously its in private hands and a money-maker) and they provide a guided tour for 10 bucks.. The cave must have been real scary when the Vanasse Bros hit it first , its real scary without the lights even now.. There are three levels in the cave and an artificial water body adds glamor to the aesthetics.. We had the unique experience of experiencing 100% darkness , no light whatsoever and if you think you do see something thats just ur brain doing a mental mapping (coz for us to see we got to have light reflected). Then we had a unique experience of seeing the stalactites and stalagmites - used to be always confusing during my geography study days - the guide gave a hint : stalactites - they hang 'tight' from the roof & stalagmites - they 'might' reach the roof ;-) smart aint it !! If I had visited it before may be cud've added a couple more marks in my geo exams ...Then there were bats and it was a real batty experience .. not the vampire ones of course these were less than the size of ma thumb for height ...batliputs ;-)
Then we moved on to our best thing - eating , there was food - biriyani, chappathi , egg curry and my own prawn tandoor. We heated them on the stove we carried and to top it we had good wine and some beer . We still had around 6 hours and how can we waste sometime off our lovely life ? we made our move towards our second destination the St.Croix river - we rented out a boat that served as our home for the next 4 hours , bought some minnows as bait for some river fishing - believe me those minnows were big enuf to be fried and eaten ;-)
We had our luck in fishing like 8 catfishes and a spotted bass ..we also had a small thunderstorm pass us when we anchored midway in the river - the boat swayed at varied angles but it held good .. late at nite we had some thai dinner ..
The fishes had to wait till the next day to find their spots in our bellies - marinated & fried.My friends and me had a fun time in my balcony with music and some champagne along with the roasted fish...

One of my friends had rightly pointed out that my "blog is never complete without description of food ", the reason being all good things that are happening to me mostly revolve around food - whose fault is that ;-) I am a complete socialist when it comes to food , and believe me all the vegeterians owe me big time for keeping the food chain intact ...