The Cave Kingpin Buying Up America’s Underground – There is a chap in Minnesota who is so obsessed with spelunking that he buys up any real estate where he thinks there might be some awesome caves. He might actually have the most bizarre (awesome?) portfolio in the history of investing. And, as you can expect, the state government has some issues with it.
This guy reminded me of a fellow my husband and I met serendipitously while traveling through Kentucky many years ago. We had some time to kill and took our dog for a walk along the perimeter of his land to look at this incredible cave. This cave was not dry – there was some natural spring that put off minerals that were a bright turquoise flowing through it and forming a small (but surprisingly deep) lake on the outside. Anyway, you know we always get to talking to random strangers, and he offered to take us in a canoe back into the cave (which we were too chicken to do).
He said he bought the land (which did not have any structures on it to make it “useful”) just to be able to sit out under the trees and paddle into the cave every once in a while. He was an interesting fellow and I bet he has had a great life.
The Misunderstood Python Hunters Saving the Everglades – Everyone in Florida knows about the guys who hunt pythons, which are an invasive species, in the swamps here. This is a wonderful essay about them, but it also has neat information about how the python problem came to be in the first place. (Spoiler: It started with a hurricane.)
In Praise of Hunting, Especially Today – I am not a hunter, but I am from a hunting family and enjoyed reading this.
‘Moment of a lifetime’ for Italians taking advantage of museums emptied of tourists by COVID lockdown – Italians are flocking to their own museums as there are no tourists clogging them at the moment. This made me think about what it would be like to live in a place with so many culturally significant items (at least until they get cancelled) and never being able to see them because of the hordes of people traveling there every year. Not as romantic as it seems, I suppose.
Days of Sunshine 