My Old Kentucky Roam

Man, these Southerners really know how to strap on the feed-bag! After our last post we stopped at the Cantuckee Diner for a fried chicken buffet (I know! Kentucky Fried Chicken!) and languished back to the car for our drive to Abraham Lincoln’s Birthplace.

According to our observations, one of the biggest moral failures of Hodgenville, Kentucky is the commercialization of the birth of our 16^th president. When we arrived at the National Memorial, we were surprised to an opulent staircase leading to a marble temple, which housed the bucolic cabin that we were expecting to see. I suppose that the juxtaposition did represent well the social ascension of Abraham Lincoln’s life. We filled our water bottles at the sinking spring, where Lincoln probably took his first sips of water.

After a short drive we were elated to enter Mammoth Cave National Park where we quickly snagged a campsite for the next two nights. After some stew, it was off to bed since we planned to spend the next day in the cave.

Our first spelunk of the morning was the “historic entrance tour,” which follows part of the tour that has been part of Mammoth Cave since 1816. As one of the first tourist destinations in the United States, it contains graffiti, which ranges from prehistoric to modern. The rooms seemed to go on endlessly, hence the name.. It turns out that Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world, with over four hundred miles mapped and hundreds more possibly unmapped…

After a southern lunch (which is defined as any lunch that comes with a biscuit), we went to a program on the slave history of Mammoth Cave. Many of the early guides were slaves and some became famous for their skills. It would be a stretch to say that they were treated well, they were still slaves, but it was generally a better life than working agriculturally.

Our second descent into the cave was in the afternoon, where we went through the “new” entrance, which was blasted in 1921. Before Mammoth Cave was a National Park, there were multiple landowners vying for the best cave tours. This entrance was one of the few successes since it took tourists to a part of the cave which was not sandstone capped, allowing the water to percolate through and create cave formations known as Frozen Niagra.

We ended the day with a ranger program on cave art throughout the world. Lisa was excited to see art from Lascaux Cave in France where she had visited in 2000.

With no destination in mind the next day, we decided to head south to Nashville. We walked around music row, found some studios where Elvis had recorded. We enjoyed the clean look and shady avenues lined with magnolia trees. We ate another southern lunch with fried okra and collard greens at “The Row” before heading west. We had to get out before we developed coronary heart disease!

Our only other stop of the day was at Fort Donalson National Battlefield, which was a beautiful overlook on the Cumberland River. It was one of the earliest Union victories of the Civil War, allowing the acquisition of much of the supply lines in Tennessee. It’s not surprising that the Confederacy lost since their leader was named General Pillow, what a softee! We played all of the civil war songs that we could think of on our guitar and fiddle at the overlook and got back in the car to head west.

We are currently en route to Lake Wappapello in Missouri for the night where it looks like we will find more positive meteorological conditions for the evening. We just crossed over the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers! As we begin to leave the south, we’ve decided that this will cease to be a road-trip across ‘murica and begin to be a road trip across America!