Mark & Friends
I remember when our nephew, Dan, was Mark's age and younger. He would quickly make a new friend, and pal around with them until we would leave our destination. Mark is the same. Here are Mark and Christopher and Andrew. They stayed near the front of the line, and Matt and I never really interacted with them the whole trip. There was a group of 8 children, and then we 6 adults always formed the back of the line.
Over and over, I said to Matt, "This would NEVER happen in the US". Actually, I think these things would happen back 25 years ago, before we became such a litigious society. You see, we were never made to sign a waiver to the cango caves that stated that we knew our risk, and we would not sue them in the case of injury. What we were told was that we should not go in if we were claustrophobic, but there was no mention of weight or height restrictions. Later we learned that a bigger woman tried to go through a few years back. She was warned against going, but as one man told us, "She was stubborn, but she learned her lesson." Turns out, she got stuck in the "Tunnel of Love", a narrow passageway in the cave. She was stuck for 12 hours, and they had to get a speical oil to grease her out, and they even needed to cut away some of the cave to get her out. Seems after that, they would have some standard for weight/girth, but no, you can still decide on your own!
Another thing that was true that would not have happened in the US was that the kids were allowed to go ahead of us a few times. So, Mark et. al. would go ahead and we adults would slowly make our way through, sometimes having to crawl on our stomachs, on our backs, etc. Matt and I would laugh when we heard Mark's voice echo back to us, excitedly telling his friends soemthing.
