Kentucky

On Tuesday, June 29th, we headed for Kentucky. We drove through Illinois, Indiana, and stopped at Horse Camp Kentucky, thus hitting 14 states so far! We stayed at another KOA in Horse Camp. When we set up our tent trailer, we found that our full bottle of laundry soap was not so full anymore! In fact, half of it had managed to leak all over the floor, and the boys sleeping bags!! This was the H-E soap too, so it was quite concentrated! I spent quite some time, slipping around on my hands and knees, trying to get it all off the floor, while Marcus rinsed rags and handed them back to me for more. That was fun!! Thank goodness, KOAs have Laundromats! We were able to wash and dry the boys' sleeping bags there. Whew! It was finally cool enough that evening to have a wood fire, so we cooked our dinner over that. It turned out there were quite a few flesh-eating bugs there too, so we put up our mesh tent over the picnic table, played a few games together, and ate there.

The next morning, we decided to go out for breakfast as a special treat. Boy were we edumacated on how different things are around here from California!! First, when we walked in, we were greeted with a wave of cigarette smoke! Smoking in a restaurant?! Our boys had never experienced such a thing! We went as far away as we could in the non smoking section, but with recirculated air, it didn't seem to make much difference. The next step in our edumactaion was the menu! Grits, biscuits and gravy, deep fried cornbread and hash browns?! Wow! And the portions! Huge! No wonder the people we had been seeing lately were 2-3 times our size!! Not sure when we will go out for breakfast again. Too dangerous!

After breakfast, we walked back to our campground, and passed a field that was knee-high and full of wildflowers and butterflies. The boys counted 14 different kinds of butterflies! Colin was so fun to watch as he chased butterflies across the field! He caught a few as well. As we continued our walk back, we passed the KOA mini golf and decided to play a friendly family game. Derek was quite careful about keeping everyones' score in his head, since there were no score sheets. I was quite good at it! I even got a special award for taking 16 shots to get in on the 16th hole!! Perhaps I shouldn't brag so!

The time finally came for our Mammoth Cave Tour. We took the Violet Lantern Tour, so our tour was all lit by lanterns. There were about 40 people and 10 lanterns. It was kind of a cool way to experience the caves, but you didn't see as well, and the smell of burning kerosene was quite strong. Mammoth Cave is mostly dry, so you don't see any of the formations that most of us are used to associating with caves, unless you take one of the tours that takes you to the one main section that has them specifically. We decided to do that the next morning. That way, we would see the caves in the light too, getting two ways to experience the caves. From the tour we learned that the Indians had harvested Gypsum thousands of years ago in these caves, that Salt Petre was collected from the dirt in the caves to help make gun powder to fight the war of 1812, and that tours were led for the wealthy in the early 1800's with slaves as the guides.We even got to see what they claimed was 3,000 year old poop in the cave! Yippee, lucky us!

Colin did his first Jr. Ranger Activity Booklet at Mammoth and got his first Ranger Badge. He was quite into it, completing 24 instead of the 12 bat points needed for his age group! Go Colin!!

The trip through the new entrance to the cave on Thursday morning was very cool. It was full of steep, narrow passageways, and the lighting allowed us to see the cave walls better. There was no ancient graffiti like there was in the original known part of the cave. The formations in the last part of this section were very impressive!