Once we had our fill of bourbon touring, it was time to see what else Kentucky had to offer. Of course, according to our tour guides, it is either basketball, horses or bourbon but we found some wholesome fun nearby that wasn’t any of the Kentucky big three.
Our thought was that given it was fall and that corn had to be a major crop in the area, being a key ingredient in bourbon, there must be a corn maze around somewhere. We found a family farm in Elizabethtown that advertised corn mazes and nature trails. We drove the 20 miles to get there and enjoyed an afternoon of walking through the corn fields around the quaint farm. This really would be a great place to bring young kids for the day. We big kids had fun too. The maze was more of a scavenger hunt than a puzzling maze. You were tasked with finding all the belongings that one Mr. T. Wister lost in a recent tornado. We made it through the maze with 2 items missing on our list so we ventured through again, making sure we took alternate paths that were missed on our first pass.
On our way to the farm, we saw signs for Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, so when we left the farm, we headed to this National Historic Park to check it out. A marble monument very similar to the one in Washington DC sits upon a hill. It turns out this monument pre-dates the one in DC by several years. Funds were raised by the Lincoln Farm Association in 1906 to have the monument built. We drove back to Bardstown via a route that would take us by Lincoln’s childhood home that his family moved to after they were evicted from the land where he was born. They were forced to move due to property rights disputes that resulted from poor record keeping and poor surveying practices.
We left Bardstown for Cave City on Tuesday to spend some time spelunking in Mammoth Cave National Park. We arrived in the early afternoon, in fact it was earlier than expected as we crossed into Central Time. It turns out both Kentucky and Tennessee are split between Eastern and Central timezones. With most of the afternoon still available to us, we drove the 10 miles to the visitors center and decided to sign up for the 2:30 pm tour of the cave. This was a very interesting tour but given that we had over 2 miles to cover and only an hour and a half to do it in, there wasn’t much stopping and talking by our tour guide. Some of the history was interesting and the fact that tours have been going on in these caves before the Civil War is pretty amazing.
Instead of doing more spelunking on our second day in Mammoth Cave National Park, we decided to some hiking on the surface. We enjoyed a nice hike with some history about the tourists that came to the area in the 19th century. Steam boats would bring visitors eager to tour the caves to the location via the Green River (Amy says it looked more brown than green).
One challenge we face during the month of October as we travel through the eastern states is finding sites for the weekend nights. We intentionally did not plan too many stops ahead of time this trip in order to remain flexible. However, we did make reservations for a COE (Corps of Engineers) campground outside of Nashville that began on Sunday. We needed a place to stay Friday and Saturday night because, like most campgrounds around, the one in Cave City was booked for those weekend nights. We found a place right off I-65 called Dad’s Bluegrass Campground. We learned our lesson in Year One not to expect much from an RV park right off the interstate. With low expectations for this campground, we were pleasantly surprised. It was quite nice and in the summer months they have live music. We wouldn’t go out of our way to stay here again but will keep it in mind for future trips.
On our way from Elizabethtown to Dad’s Bluegrass Campground we drove by the National Corvette Museum. Dan’s dream car since he was a boy is the 1967 Corvette Stingray so we decided to drive back up to the museum, located in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and check out the history of this iconic American automobile. It was a nice and unexpected excursion as we finished up our time in Kentucky and prepared to spend a few days in Nashville, TN area.
The campground at Seven Points is a single one way loop with all the campsites along the road. We had site #10 and we had more difficulty getting into the site than we should have. As a result, we had a line of 5 or 6 RVs waiting to get by so they could get to their sites. Dan did not let this get to him like he might have a year ago. We slowly worked the RV into the site, avoiding trees and such. Once we were off the road but still needed to do some repositioning, we let all the RVs go by. The site was nice and I’m sure if we could make a second attempt at backing in it would go a lot smoother. Live and learn and practice, practice, practice.
We drove into Nashville to do the touristy thing on Monday. The first challenge of the day was to find a place to safely park the truck. We were told at a visitors center off of I-65 that there was free parking at the Titan’s football stadium. This turned out to not be true and we ended up parking another block over. It was a little less than a mile walk from where we parked to the honky tonk section of downtown Nashville.
Our first stop as we entered the entertainment district was to tour the Johnny Cash museum. This is a rather small museum but was packed with information and memorabilia on the iconic music star. We learned that he is one of a few musicians that has had music first released on practically every format the industry has seen, from the vinyl 33-45-78 through reel-to-reel, 8-track and cassette to CD and MP3 download. He had new singles released through 6 different decades. One display that was particularly interesting was the display of all the artists that have covered Johnny Cash songs. You could browse the library by Cash song and see what other artists have recorded them. Some songs were only covered once but others, like “I Walk the Line” was covered over 100 times. Also on display was a copy of the famous photograph of the Million Dollar Quartet signed by Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis’ signature was not able to be obtained.
After the museum tour and a light lunch, we settled in at Bailey’s, a honky tonk on Broadway, to listen to a solo musician by the name of Mark Burke. This venue was the most appealing to us as the music wasn’t too loud and something about the young musician struck a chord with us. We had a beer and listened for almost an hour before calling it a day and heading back to our campground. As for downtown Nashville, we can now say we’ve done it and I’m not sure we would go out of our way to do it again. Maybe with a group of people but for us, once is enough.
Lovely pics and write up. Nashville is on my bucket list…someday! Paul and I have been watching a documentary series on country music so Nashville, Johnny Cash and the likes have been the main focus. Sounds like you’re off to a great start for year two!