The Meandering Vacation: Chapter 4

Monday morning I awoke early, grabbed the laptop and headed to the free breakfast offered by the hotel. I checked my Emails and surfed the web for about an hour, sipping my tea, before checking out breakfast. It was the usual hotel breakfast, with tons of pastries, cereals, and breads, and little in the way of “real food”. I found that all of the free hotel breakfasts on our trip offered hard boiled eggs, which I usually ate.

Now I’m a little bit torn about checking my Emails while on vacation. On one side I just love modern technology, and it makes me able to go on vacation without worrying about problems at work. On the other hand I sure miss the days when going on vacation was forced relaxation, and you honestly didn’t even think about work for the entire time you were gone. I vividly remember the first time we went on vacation after Ron got his first cell phone. We left on vacation and one of his sub contractors called with a question. If we hadn’t had the cell phone nothing would have got done on that part of the job for the whole week we were gone. Ron was delighted, elated, and was able to relax the whole time we were gone just because people called him with questions that got answered, and he was making money while we vacationed.

Where were we? Oh yeah, Mammoth Cave. We left the hotel at the crack of 10:30 and got to Mammoth Cave about an hour later. When you get off the exit to Mammoth Cave they say to drive west for a few miles. Trust me, it’s more like 10 miles, and not all of the signs are clear telling you how to get there: it reminded me of a road rally. You might be tempted to stop at any one of the dozen or so trinket shops along the way, or Dinosaur World, or camp sites, etc.

Once we found the headquarters nestled on top of a densely wooded mountain, which was honestly a beautiful place, we parked and went inside. There were more than a half dozen different cave tours you could take and we decided on the “snowball tour” which started in about a half hour and included a box lunch inside the cave (for an extra $5). It was a 3 hour tour, and now you’ll have the theme to Gilligan’s Island in your head for the rest of the day. This particular cave wasn’t pretty like some you might think of, but it was large, which I loved because of my slight claustrophobia, and it had over 150 years of history. I’ll give you some pictures here of 100+ year old graffiti and of our lunch.



These are the "Snowballs" made of either lime or gypsum (I forget which).









Here is my Ronnie standing in the "lunch room" where we had turkey sandwiches, chips, and an apple. I actually drank coffee to get warm.
Hello! It's me!

This is he ladie's bathroom at the bottom of the cave. I honestly thought it was one of the coolest parts of the tour. How did they get plumbing down there, and can you imagine the lift pumps needed to get the "stuff" back up? Yikes!

This is some 100 year + grafitti. I reads "Cofland's Tonic" which I'm guessing was a few medicinal herbs soaked in cheap vodka. They wrote the grafitti using the soot from the flames of their candles.

We left the caves and headed just a few miles down the highway to the National Corvette Museum. Almost all of the cars there are on loan from private individuals, and other than that I think the photos will tell the rest of the story... tomorrow.