I was pleasantly surprised with how beautiful Kentucky was. I guess I expected it to be one large rural slum, which it definitely was not. Funny how we get these ideas in our heads.
Most of what we saw was farm land. There wasn't any one crop that seemed to dominate the landscape but the one thing we saw that we didn't see else where was tobacco.
The first destination that we had was Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace. We were about 15 miles from there when we came across Lincoln's boyhood home. It was just a small log cabin, but it was interesting to see the inside and how people lived at that time. Very minimalist. It also turned out to be a good thing that we stopped to get a view of the inside, but we wouldn't know that until later.
Then we made out way to the main historic site.
This was pretty cool and disappointing at the same time. The Visitor Center had some great stuff about his early life and what it was like to live on the frontier. However the actually memorial (I had no idea that this was also the first national memorial to him predating the one in Washington by a decade) was undergoing renovations so we weren't able to go inside. Zut Alors! Good thing we saw the interior of the other cabin;.
After that we grabbed a quick bite on the road and bombed down to Mammoth Caves
The caves were so cool. Both figuratively and literally, it was a perfect 54 degrees inside, which was very welcome being as had been in the mid 90s for a few days. If any of you find yourself in Kentucky, make a point to check this out and tour some of the caves. It's time well spent. The cave system is almost 400 miles in its entirety. We did the "Historic Tour" which starts at the largest natural entrance to the caves.
The only thing that it was missing was stalactites and stalagmites. However the ranger told us that those do exist in various parts of the caves, namely on the "New Entrance Tour", just not where we were. At the same time, the massive rooms, bottomless pits, and wall formations were more than enough to impress.
Not much to speak of after the caves. We decided to alter the plan a little bit and head up closer to St Louis so we'd be in better position for the Arch in the morning. On the way we passed through Indiana and Illinois but it was dark so there isn't much to say about it.
Oh wait! For the first time the whole trip Dad finally gave up behind the wheel and I ended up driving for about 150 miles. Mostly because he got some massive blisters in DC and the 2 miles in the caves didn't help at all. Atlas (I've told him that we need to finalize the results btw) is an interesting ride. I don't think it was really designed for people of my height, but I've driven much worse so I can't really complain.
The one other thing I've found that I'll let you in on is lodging coupons. At every rest stop they have little magazine like things advertising lodging in the area. These are a great way to find deals on rooms. We've trimmed down the lodging budget substantially because of them.
Hopefully I'll have enough energy to get today's post up too, but it seems to be taking forever to upload the pictures. We'll see.
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