What a great day today. A little rain here and there between Lexington and Bowling Green, but gee, if it weren't for rain Earth would be Mars, just bigger.
We did everything just a little too early today - we could have slept later than 6:30. We could have lingered over breakfast. We were too early for the Horse Park. We have already decided to come back to Lexington next May and spend a week in order to see more of the area. We were looking forward to a short day of driving, so it turned out to be a good day to play the tourist. Unfortunately, the Horse Park didn't open until 10, and we didn't want to hang around Lexington that long.
Our second stop after the Horse Park was intended to be the Makers Mark distillery in Loretto, Kentucky, also the home of a well-known convent. We aren't frequent visitors to convents, but the idea of a bourbon tour got us to exit Route 65. Same problem as at the horse farm - the tour was starting at 10:30, and we were there at 9:30. So much for that idea - we did see some lovely countryside though. Kentucky is really a lot like Vermont without as much snow.
As we neared Hogdenville, suddenly everything was Lincoln. The Abe Lincoln boyhood home in Knob Creek was partially closed due to last spring's ice storms--kind of ironic since my FEMA Public Assistance bride and I have worked most of this year on the New England ice storms. There's no escaping debris.
A few miles down the road in Hodgenville we visited the modest but interesting Lincoln Museum, and a few miles out of town visited the less modest Lincoln birthplace at a spot called Sinking Springs.
By then our feet we getting a little tired, and I couldn't look at another five dollar bill. Mary F. said, could we not do any more Lincolns today? So we headed on down Route 65 in our '05 MPV (which our friend Ken says stands for "Mostly Plastic Vehicle") for what we anticipated would be an easy visit to: Mammoth Cave.
One thing we hadn't noticed between Lexington and Bowling Green: the time change from Eastern to Central Daylight Savings. At Mammoth Cave we bought tickets for the Historical Tour (how hard can that be?) and waited for 2 o'clock, which would have been thirty minutes by our watches, which were an hour ahead of everyone else's there. Finally we went outside the visitor center and stood under the tin-roof canopy to get our final instructions from our guide, although we couldn't hear a word he said because a level 7 monsoon picked that moment to fall on us and the tin roof was aroar. After a bit, the rain softened and we followed our leader onto the trail that would lead us to the entrance to the cave, whereupon the monsoon unleashed itself upon us again, and for the quarter mile before we actually were underground, we became soaked to, and through, the skin. A funny thing happened as we entered the cave: the temperature, about 85 degrees outside, became 53 degrees inside, and our soaking clothes now emulated an ice pack. Our guide, a boisterous fellow who apparently dreamt of Broadway, warned us about this, but too late.
First of all, Mammoth Cave isn't like other caves we've seen. The big parts are dry as a bone, and there are no stalactites or stalagmites. There's nothing pretty in the whole place. It's just, well, mammoth. We've been to Crystal Caves in Bermuda, which is about one millionth the size, but has beautiful lighting and lovely deep pools and interesting colors. Mammoth Cave is 371 miles long if it were untangled, and the two miles featured for tourists have two colors: gray and brownish gray. Now I should mention here that as a lifelong claustrophobe and acrophobe, I seem to spend a hell of a lot of time either in caves or airplanes, not to mention the edges of canyons. I do that for the same reason most guys do most things: to prove I'm not chicken.
After two miles of walking, sometimes in huge caverns, and sometimes through tight places with names like Fat Man's Misery (an especially poignant name for yours truly), without enough light to read your wristwatch (which I was trying to do more and more frequently), it was time to climb, literally, up the 155 steps to the entrance. Yes, this is the same guy who swore off Albuterol a few months ago and left his CPAP machine at home.
We survived, and celebrated our survival by a sumptious meal at a hopping place called Montana Grill in Bowling Green.
Oh, we missed the Corvette Museum. I guess we weren't meant for the fast lane.
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