Tunnels

For a while we lived in Fontana. We moved there from Arizona so that our Dad could help the struggling family office supply business. Things were tough because his Dad was having health issues related to the heart (Go figure... :)) )

Well, we moved into this really nice house a bit out of town. It had a lot of bedrooms and was on a really big lot. Next door there was nothing built yet and it was a giant dirt lot with Eucalyptus trees lining the property.

We moved in during the summer time, school was out. Both our parents were working, my Mom having found a job working at a construction company in Colton.

It didn't take us very long to use that big dirt area for our "Fort". Only this fort was an underground fort. We found some shovels and started digging. We didn't tell our parents - we were going to surprise them when we got done.

We dug for days. A big, long, straight main entrance and then a perpendicular tunnel meeting the main tunnel. We added rooms at the ends of the T. The whole thing was probably three feet deep - deep enough for two little boys to crawl through...barely.

Now, what to cover the tunnels with? It took days for us to find a pile of abandoned plywood sitting along the tree line. With considerable effort we dragged the plywood over to the tunnel area. We covered the entire tunnel in plywood.

Now it was pretty obvious that the plywood would give away our secret location, so we proceeded to cover the plywood in dirt - plenty of it!

Finally, we had tons (Probably not tons, but when you are little... ) of dirt disguising one of the coolest tunnel systems on the planet.

One problem - the tunnel was very dark. How to solve this problem? Go to the garage and you will find kerosene lanterns!

We drug those lanterns with us into the tunnels and lit them! We were pretty proud of ourselves for that move!!

Well, when the time came to show off our "Fort" to our parents we expected praise like we had never known before. After all, we had worked for days building this beauty!

Our parents came out to the dirt field and didn't exactly react the same way we had anticipated. It seems that they were very concerned about all the dirt that was placed on the flimsy plywood...even more excited when we showed them how we were able to illuminate the tunnels. Saving the most excitement for the fact that the lanterns were sucking the oxygen right out of the rooms at the end where we spent most of our time!

To our parents this was a "DEATH TRAP"!!!! Take that down right now...Norris, help the boys take this apart before someone gets hurt! Don't you ever build something like this without talking to us first!

Parents sure don't have a sense of adventure...