USA travelers: The Bluegrass State

Today is Tuesday June 10. We are currently in Ashtabula County Ohio. First I will backtrack to our activities since my last post. While we were in the Nashville area we calculated the cost of paying campground fees and decided we needed to find a way to economize. We found a membership in Thousand Trails camping and bought a membership. Our yearly fees cover 60 nights of free camping per year and $3 a night after that. You can stay up to 14 nights at any campground but if you spend more than four nights in any spot you have to leave for seven nights before returning to a membership campground. Our system has been to stay four nights and move to the next place. With that in mind we left Tennessee June 1 and drove up I-65 into Kentucky. We stayed in Mammoth Cave National Park for four nights. The closest city was Bowling Green and we drove there to get some food at Kroger. While there we stopped at Camping World to pick up a satellite dish since most of the campgrounds we will be staying at do not have cable. After the upfront cost for the equipment we will be paying about $54 a month. That cost is doable since we have eliminated our campground fee budget. We bought the Dish Tailgater and Dish receiver. The Tailgater is portable and automatic. Just face it to the southwest sky and that is it.
We were really trying to just lay low for a while after all we have seen and done since leaving on May 4. We spent one day sightseeing. First stop was Mammoth Cave National Park:

Since we had other stops to hit for the day we didn't go on the cave tour which takes a couple of hours. The tour is not handicap accessible anyway so the ranger directed us to the cave entrance to take a look. There is a long descending path to the cave entrance:

At the bottom of the path stairs descend into the subterranean cave:

The amazing characteristic of the cave is the sudden change of temperature you can feel as soon as you approach the entrance. A cold blast of 55* air hits your legs and, as you take the first several steps, your entire body. Mammoth Cave is the longest mapped cave in the world with nearly 400 miles of known passages.

One could spend days or even weeks enjoying the park. In addition to the cave there are miles of hiking trails throughout the park.

After Mammoth Cave it was off to Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace and boyhood home about 45 minutes north of Mammoth Cave. They are two separate site. His birthplace is about eight miles from his boyhood home. If you are going to visit keep in mind the boyhood home is only open Thursday through Sunday. You can visit the other days but the buildings are not open and there is no park ranger on duty.

Lincoln was born in 1809 on his father's farm several miles outside of what would be Hodgenville, KY. until his family moved to another location in 1811, hence the boyhood home historic site.

There is a short video presentation in the visitor's center along with a cross section of the "boundary oak" which was an oak tree that marked the property line and was about 30 years old when Lincoln was born. The tree died in 1976 and was 16 feet in diameter. It was a common practice in those days to use a prominent tree to mark the property line. After leaving the visitor center head to the memorial housing the famous log cabin of his birth. There is only one problem: historians discovered that the cabin that was preserved is not the actual Lincoln cabin. The cabin never less has become an iconic symbol associated with Lincoln and is very similar to the actual cabin. There are 56 steps leading up to the memorial representing each year of the president's life:

The entrance is around the back of the building. Inside is the cabin:

The ranger was telling Doreen that log cabins built in Kentucky differ from those built further north. Log cabins built in the south are taller with the logs further apart to keep the cabin cooler.

We then headed into Hodgenville and the Lincoln Museum before it closed. The museum was just a commercialized collection of paraphernalia and bric-a-brac. I didn't go in so I hung out in the square while Doreen went in: