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Well, I sure was the cheap tourist today. I managed to visit three National Park Service sites, even though one of them was closed. Whoops!<\/p>\n
So… What did happen today. (A word of warning about the photos… Something is odd with the automatic exposure on my camera. I think<\/i> that it was set to ‘center spot weighted’ from when I was doing some eBay photos, so the exposure is quite a bit…. Off… In some of the shots. I’m sorta frustrated at that. At least it can be cleaned up if need be.)<\/p>\n
Well, first I woke up at right about 8am, got dressed, then headed southbound on I-65 towards Mammoth Cave National Park<\/a>. I stopped at Burger King for some breakfast (two egg\/cheese crossants, hash browns, and a coffee) as it’s the only really veggie-friendly breakfast-serving fast food place that I know of. The trip down there didn’t really take too long, and while heading southbound I somehow hit a timezone border. WTF? I was headed practically straight south… Regardless, that all put me at the park at about 9:40am CST, which was just in time for the 9:45am Frozen Niagara<\/a> tour. It turns out that this particular tour is the longest one offered on weekdays during the winter season. I wouldn’t have minded something longer, but with that being the only option, I took it.<\/p>\n The tour started off with a bus ride over to the cave entrance, which is surprisingly nothing more than a stainless steel door set into a concrete block. Inside the door is a stairway leading down to another door, with the stairway acting as an airlock of sorts. Half of the tour group entered, shut the entrance door, opened the bottom one, then proceeded into the proscribed portion of the cave system. Then the rest of the group… etc.<\/p>\n Something to note if you ever take this tour, the part of this whole journey which I found the most challenging was the beginning… For quite a period of time you are walking down a series of stainless steel stairs which are in some places as wide as my shoulders. In other places one occasionally needs to turn sideways or bend WAY over to avoid large pieces of rock which encroach on the passageway. This, combined with the 60′ – 100′ drop makes for an interesting walk. Not bad, but with my not really caring for heights it proved slightly nerve wracking. It’s the sort of thing that would be a lot easier to deal with if there weren’t people in front of and behind me.<\/p>\n Anyway…<\/p>\n After you get through the doorway, you spend the next ~1.5 hours winding through all sorts of amazing underground passages, some with 30′ ceilings and some which you definitely need to bend over in order to fit through. At one point you arrive at a rather open room which has a number of wooden benches fixed to it’s sloping floor. Here is another point where the tour guide explains all sorts of different things; how the caves were formed, who initially found them, the original private ownership of them, etc. This was also the point at which the lights in the cave were turned off and we got to sit in total darkness. I have to say, I found the absolute complete darkness of the cave, combined with the ever so soft cool breeze, to be rather comforting. I haven’t been fortunate enough to experience total darkness since the last time I was in a darkroom manually rolling film… It was really nice, and really relaxing.<\/p>\n After a bit more wandering and attemptes at picture taking, we eventually exited a revolving door and popped back up to the surface, back into the daylight. A bus ride back to the Visitor’s Center and the tour was over.<\/p>\n After getting back to the Visitor’s Center, I decided to take a walk down the near by path which leads to the point where the river Styx pops out into above-ground-ness and meets up with the Green River. Along the way I stopped by the Historic Entrance to the caves, and also walked up to one other entrance who’s name currently eludes me. The second entrance was fenced off and is a protected habitat area, and it appeared that people don’t enter it very often. Heading back to the main part of the trail, I headed down to the river Styx itself.<\/p>\n I must say, the walk down wasn’t so bad… But it was all down hill. That meant that coming back would be somewhat difficult, and combined with my poor eating as of late and all the other walking prior, I was feeling pretty bad by the time I got back. I made a trip to the restroom for some water, then over to the coffee shop place which is part of the park’s hotel.<\/p>\n Oh, here is where I’m going to talk about how nice people are here. I don’t know why, but I’ve found that most people in Kentucky and southern Indiana just seem to be nicer than people in the Detroit area. It’s not anything specific that is done, just the way people talk, how they seem friendly, and courteous to everyone, not just people they know. It’s different, but very refreshing.<\/p>\n I made my way into the coffee shop (think 1950s ‘coffee shop’) sat down at the counter near the cashiers, and asked for a grilled cheese. I was served a pretty decent three-slice-of-various-cheeses sandwhich, topped with a pile of ridiculously fresh french fries. Not bad at all…<\/p>\n Well, after eating I snapped a few more pictures and then headed back to my car. On the way out of the park I stopped to wander down another trail to Sand Cave, and ended up talking to a guy from Michigan who was down there with his kids to pick up a Bobcat (the small front end loader things) which he purchased off of eBay. I snapped a picture of him with his kids for him (he had a nice, shiny, wonderful to use D100) and we talked for a bit, then parted ways.<\/p>\n On the way back to the highway, I managed to stop a couple other places, too. The first was this really odd religious amusement park thing called ‘Golgotha Fun Park’. For those who don’t know, Golgotha is supposedly the place where Jesus was crucified, and is also a term for ‘a place of great suffering’. (I once had a file server named golgotha… Hmm…) So uhm…. Yeah. There’s some odd folk around there. I also stopped off at another closed down tourist attraction called Guntown Mountain. It seems that at this place you can see all sorts of wild west stuff, and take what appears to be a ski lift up to the top of a hill. Once one is up there, though, I’m not too clear on exactly what you are supposed to see.<\/p>\n After collecting a few interesting touristy photos, I started heading back north on I-65 towards Louisville and then the hotel. On the way down I had remembered seeing a sign for the Maker’s Mark Still, so I took an exit and hoped to find it. Well, 20 miles down the road I either missed it or something. I eventually saw a sign about Lincoln’s boyhood home, so I headed that way. This wasn’t a bad choice, because I got to see some nice windy road in some absolutely beautiful rolling Kentucky hills. The house itself was a bit small, and the National Park Service hadn’t done much with it yet (it was actually privately owned up until a few years ago), but it was still interesting to visit. According to maps I saw, a bit further down the road was Lincoln’s actual birthplace, so I decided to head there. Unfortunately, the park closed at 4:45pm, and I arrived at 5:05pm. Ah well… 20 minutes late. I grabbed a picture of the sign, and then took off. Ah well.<\/p>\n A bit more road navigation later (GPS is great for this, but my windshield mount has stopped sticking reliably, for some reason) and I was back on I-65, heading back north… Again. Although it probably doesn’t need to be said, I did more than a little bit of backtracking while visiting the Lincoln sites.<\/p>\n In some of the hotel-provided brocures there was this Japanese Steak House \/ Sushi place mentioned as being near by. Well, the other day I’d run across it, and with the glut of greasy \/ heavy \/ crappy food I’ve been eating lately, I figured a bit of sushi and a bowl of noodles was in order. Well, I did get both… Except the food was served in standard American-sized portions. I ended up with a bowl of noodles (literally) the size of my head, and a whole side-order basket full of tempura-coated shrimp and veggies. For being southern Indiana sushi, though, it wasn’t bad. And it sure was a nice change of pace from the run of the mill fast food I’ve been eating lately… A little pricy (~$22 after tip) but it wasn’t too bad.<\/p>\n So, that brings me to where I am now, sitting in the lobby of the hotel, overlooking the pool, and typing away. The photos are all done being uploaded, so I’m going to go caption all of those and then upload this.<\/p>\n Oh, and at the very least, don’t forget to visit the picture of Golgotha Fun Park<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bye for now… :)<\/p>\n Notable photo links:<\/p>\n · Mammoth Cave National Park<\/a> Click for more… Well, I sure was the cheap tourist today. I managed to visit three National Park Service sites, even though one of them was closed. Whoops! So… What did happen today. (A word of warning about the photos… Something is odd with the automatic exposure on my camera. I think that it was\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,29,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moved-from-livejournal","category-outdoors","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14900,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729\/revisions\/14900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n· Visiting Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home(s)<\/a>
\n· The Japanese food I had for dinner: 1<\/a> & 2<\/a> (From the moblog<\/a> photos.)
\n· Ohio Falls State Park<\/a> (from Saturday)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"