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Excite

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Vacations are often the one time a year that Americans wish for. Most say they can't wait to relax. But, if we think about it everyone wants excitement. Merriam-Webster's online dictionary says that to excite is to "call to activity, rouse to an emotional response, arouse (as a strong emotional response) by appropriate stimuli." I think the biggest goal for a vacation is to "rouse [those on vacation] to an emotional response . . ." Families want to draw closer together, friends as well, and what better way to do that than to challenge the relationships by doing something 'different'. You learn a lot about those you're with. You see emotions you didn't know the person had, you see how they handle certain incidents that happen along the way.

Vacation is a word that I find synonymous with work. My family loves to camp. Well, camping is a lot of work. The entire house has to be packed into a tiny space. Everything has to be counted so that there is enough of everything to last a week or so. Inevitably, many things are forgotten, or miscounted, etc. and we end up spending half our time going to the store to buy the things we forgot.

The last time we went camping, it was just my husband and I. We went to Withrow Springs State Park in Arkansas. While we were trying to figure out what to do on our week's long trip, the sanitation truck pulled up and the man talked to us about things to do. My husband wanted to go cave exploring and mentioned it to the man. He said there was a 6 mile cave system about thirty minutes or so from the campground. He said we would need helmets, knee pads, elbow pads, flashlights, long sleeves and jeans because there were several tight fitting places we would have to be scooting on the floor of the cave or walking on our knees. He told my husband every cool place we needed to check out. Then he said he'd be back after finishing his rounds and he'd bring a map and everything.

He came back and brought a copy of the cave system map and suggested we get a county map from downtown that would show the county roads located on the cave map. So, our journey began. We first went to town and got a county road map. Then we had to go shopping for helmets, knee pads, batteries, helmet lights, snacks like trail mix and beef jerky, and plenty of water bottles. We decided to bring our camera too. So, now we had all this gear that we had to carry and needed backpacks. Luckily, I had two.

The cave was so neat. We found streams with the purest

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