The "Half-Trip" to Mammoth Cave

To Mammoth Cave  or  and bust!

 

W&C and I planned to cross off two national parks from our bucket list this summer...Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) and Hot Springs (in Arkansas).  Memorial Day weekend was a good candidate for Mammoth Cave because it's only a 6-hour drive from Chicago, and there's not a whole lot to do in the area except go to Mammoth Cave.  Friday the 24th was the last day of school, so we planned to leave on Saturday morning, camp for two nights and see the cave, and then come back on Memorial Day.  I checked the weather before we left, and there were clouds projected for Sunday and a possibility of rain on Sunday night, but it didn't look like anything major.  Good to go!

It was raining in Wheaton on Friday evening, so we got everything ready but didn't take anything to the car yet.  We slept in on Saturday morning, packed the car, and headed out shortly after 10am.  We had a pretty uneventful drive except that an hour was added to our drive because of a 10-mile traffic jam at the Illinois-Indiana border due to a combination of roadwork and holiday weekend traffic.  We actually made it all the way into Kentucky before we stopped to stretch our legs and use the bathroom.  We got to Mammoth Cave National Park at around 5:30pm.  Our campsite was already a little wet from rain the previous few days, so there was some mud but the campsite was perfectly fine.  The sky was clear, and we had a lovely evening in camp.  W&C set up the tent while I built the fire and then made cheesy beef stroganoff for dinner.  We probably turned in at around 9:30pm and played Farkel in the tent for a while before going to sleep.

Sunday morning dawned cloudy and warm.  Clouds were forecast for the whole day, but no rain.  I realized that we had forgotten the eggs in the refrigerator at home, and we were planning to eat eggs-and-bacon for breakfast the first day.  I myself have a personal tradition of eating fried Spam with honey on flour tortillas for breakfast on the final day of camping.  That was planned for Monday morning.  So we decided just to switch our breakfast menus and eat eggs-and-bacon on Monday morning instead, and we would find a place to pick up some eggs during the day.  No problem.  We ate breakfast, tidied up the campsite, and headed out for our 9am tour of Mammoth Cave.

Mammoth Cave is an amazing natural wonder.  There's nothing quite like it, because the cave is simply just so gigantic.  The first major chamber is called the "Rotunda" because of its round shape, and it's probably 100 feet in diameter and at least 20 feet high.  Walking through the main passages of Mammoth Cave is like walking in a shopping mall, that's how big it is.  And because the ceiling is sandstone, the cave stays pretty dry.  There are hardly any stalactites or stalagmites at all.  It's amazing because, again,  there just isn't anything else like it.  A few of the underground attractions include: 

• huge wooden salt-peters vats dating all the way back to the War of 1812; 
• stone huts built for tuberculosis patients who tried living underground as a means of treatment (which didn't work);
• candle-smoke graffiti reading "Luther Ewing's String Band 1874".

We finished the tour shortly after 11am, and exited the cave to severe thunderstorms.  We raced back to the visitor center, did a little shopping, and then raced again back to the car.  We immediately drove to the campsite to check on our tent and our gear.  The campsite had more water, but the tent was still on high ground and everything inside was dry.  W&C waited in the car while I grabbed all of our sleeping gear out of the tent and stuffed it into the car to keep it dry.  No one wanted to leave, and we still had reservations for our afternoon tour at a nearby cave called "Hidden River Cave," which boasts the world's longest underground swinging bridge.  We had a little time to kill, and we needed to get fuel and eggs for the morning anyway.

So we drove the 10 miles to Cave City and fueled up the Sorento.  While there, my phone got a signal and I saw that an email had come through from Hidden River Cave saying that my reservation had been refunded!  I called them, and they said that they have to close the cave for the day because of flooding.  Also, they were not allowed to take anyone down into the cave during lightning storms.  So that was a major blow for us.  And by this time, it was storming and raining so hard that we were starting to see tree branches fall down.  We considered taking a tour of the Diamond Caverns (which is another nearby cave tour), but by this time we were already starting to think about just packing up and coming home simply because so much water had fallen from the sky.  And the forecast called for more severe rain between 10pm and 3am.  We decided to save our money and go home.

That was a good decision.  We drove back to the campsite to pack up the tent, and the entire campsite was now flooded with multiple inches of pooled water.  We scoped out other campsites to see if we might switch, but there was a not a dry campsite in our entire loop.  That was the fastest I have ever packed up a tent.  I simply pulled it up, pulled out the poles, and then stuffed the whole thing into one of our duffels.  Driving out the campground, I actually had to stop and move a felled tree limb that had fallen over the road and had just missed an RV trailer.  We were back on the road by 1:30pm, less than twenty-fours after we had arrived!

We had an uneventful drive home.  Going through Indianapolis I saw signs for the Indy 500, and realized that the race was happening right then!  Doing some quick online searching, we saw that the race had been delayed, probably by the same storm system that had hit the Mammoth Cave area as well.  Later, we saw that the race had a really exciting finish that we watched on YouTube, as Josef Newgarden won his second Indy 500 in a row.

Back home that night, C went to sleep while W&I watched The Sixth Sense.  We had been talking about that movie in the car as an example of "dramatic irony."  [W had been instructing us on the three types of irony he had learned in school: situational irony, verbal irony, and dramatic irony.].  With the money we saved on our canceled cave tour, we decided to eat out at Culver's the next day.  We also decided that we still want to go back to do the Hidden River Cave tour and walk the world's longest underground swinging bridge.  Maybe we'll make it a stop on our way to Great Smoky Mountain National Park...perhaps next summer!

Eating at Culver's back in Wheaton was our consolation prize