Yagodina is a little town hidden away in Southern Bulgaria. The town has a great mountain to climb and two caves. One cave is really close to Yagodina and easy to explore and a slightly further away there's a cave which is about a half an hour away and has plenty of stairs to climb.

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We stayed in a great family hotel.

The hotel is at the bottom of a pretty serious hill. Really, I guess it's a mountain. So we climbed it.

It was pretty steep. I had to stop and catch my breath a few times. Luckily it was worth it. The view from the top was pretty great.

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Oh and there's a metal plank that juts out from the mountain so that you can get a better a view--or at least take some silly pictures.

[caption id="attachment_3683" align="alignnone" width="614" caption="On the Mountain with Friends"]<a rel="attachment wp-att-3683" href="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/?attachment_id=3683"><img class="size-large wp-image-3683 " title="On the Mountain" src="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/IMG_6408-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="614" height="409" /></a>[/caption]

Basically, we spent the morning climbing up and down the mountain and through a number of fields on our way back to the house we were staying in.

[caption id="attachment_3682" align="alignnone" width="614" caption="View from the Mountain "]<a rel="attachment wp-att-3682" href="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/?attachment_id=3682"><img class="size-large wp-image-3682 " title="View from the Mountain " src="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/IMG_6414-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="614" height="409" /></a>[/caption]

Then we went to Trigrad for lunch. From Trigrad we went the cave known as the Devil's Throat. This cave has part of a waterfall in it. I thought it was going to be really impressive. It wasn't. I mean, it's cave with a river.  A river that makes a pretty steep drop which could be a waterfall but you can't actually see that much of it.

I kind of think that if you're going to climb a bunch of questionably safe stairs that are both wet and muddy you deserve to see something<em> really awesome</em>. This cave in my mind was not this. It was fine but the stairs were kind of scary. Also the tour was less than 15 minutes.

By far my favorite of the two caves was Yagodina cave which is really long. The tour of this cave took much more like 45 minutes. There were lots of things to see like stalactites and stalagmites.  Also there are stalactites and stalagmites that look like famous people--Kiril and Methodius.  Yep, they're the creators of the Cyrillic alphabet.

I don't have any cave pictures because in my experience they turn out notoriously bad. The big problem is the lighting. I know, I know. It's hard to believe there's bad lighting in caves.

Anyhow, Yagodina is in the prefect location for both caves and to a climb the mountain peak.