Day Trip

It’s been an unusually busy summer, in a really good way. Too busy to blog much, but I wanted to write about one day in July that was a lot of fun…

The girls and I didn’t take any big trip out west this year. My budget dictated a staycation. But I wanted to do a little exploring with the girls, so I picked a day early in July to head to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The girls and I had been before, but it had been five years, and the 8-year-old didn’t remember the trip. (I remembered the trip, mostly for all the underground stairs I had to navigate while carrying the then-3-year-old.)

We couldn’t just see Mammoth Cave, however. Not when Roadside America showed so many interesting places to stop along the way. First up was the campus of Western Kentucky University, home to white squirrels. Not albino squirrels, but white ones. Just like the friendly squirrels at Vanderbilt, but with fur suited more for the arctic than the bluegrass state.

My policy when road tripping with the girls is not to tell them too much about what we might see along the way. That way, if a stone pyramid just off the highway in Wyoming isn’t all that impressive, they’re not too disappointed because they had their hopes up. But if a giant chicken in a chef’s hat is surprisingly entertaining, well, that makes the road trip a little more fun. (The girls were not impressed by the random Big Boy statue in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming, but I thought it was really funny.)

However, you can’t go looking for white squirrels on a college campus without telling your daughters what you’re looking for. They don’t have that much patience for their dad’s detours. Unfortunately, after spending 45 minutes exploring WKU, we came up empty handed. I was thinking of those friendly squirrels at Vanderbilt, sitting atop just about every trash can on campus, waiting to get a snack. Not so with the white squirrels of Bowling Green, Kentucky. Apparently, they aren’t always treated well by the college students, so they keep to themselves. Had we not gotten there in the hot part of the morning, or had there not been a storm the night before, maybe we would have spotted one. Alas.

The Western Kentucky visit wasn’t entirely disappointing. We met a very friendly university staffer who gave us detailed instructions on the best places to look for white squirrels. We took silly photos next to a bronze statue of WKU’s mascot, Big Red. Why one would commission a colorless statue of a mascot named after its color, I don’t know, but it’s not every day you see a statue of what’s basically a big Muppet, so we went with it. And I learned that when viewed from behind, a statute of Abraham Lincoln looks a lot like a statue of David Tennant, the 10th Doctor Who, at least according to the 12-year-old.

After stretching our legs in Bowling Green, we headed to Mammoth Cave. Good old Google Maps took me the back way there, but I was too worried about our time to stop and buy any of the fresh corn on the cob that the local farmers were selling out of their pickup trucks. Too bad, since I just learned this summer how easy it is to prepare corn of the cob. Somehow, that never came up before in my dad classes. (There are no dad classes.) But we eventually made it to the Mammoth Cave visitor center, and perhaps more importantly, to the nearby picnic tables where we had lunch.

Let me pause this story to give a shout-out to the $5 cooler I bought at Publix a few years ago. That thing has kept picnic lunches and a variety of other meals and snacks cool for me, all over the state of Tennessee. Way to go, cheapo cooler!

The girls and I have a bit of a tradition where we eat yogurt when we picnic on a trip. That’s not the most exciting tradition, I know, but it is what it is. I made sure to pack some Greek yogurt for our lunch, key lime flavor for the 8-year-old, orange creme for the 12-year-old, lemon meringue for me. What I forgot to pack was any form of utensil with which to eat the yogurt.

No big deal, right? I’ll just hunt around the car for a leftover plastic spoon or fork from some fast food restaurant. Except that I’ve been keeping my car cleaner than usual this summer, so I was pretty confident that there were no plastic utensils there. I spent five minutes searching with no luck, but just before giving up, I found a plastic spork, still in plastic, buried at the bottom of the glove box! I had never been so glad to see a spork.

After lunch was the point in the day when I started to get nervous. I knew that there were a few different tours of Mammoth Cave, and I wanted to make sure we got to the visitor center in time to get on one of the good ones. Five years ago, we had journeyed far into the caves (or as far as they’ll let you go with a three-year-old) on a two-hour tour. This time around, I wanted a similar experience, maybe seeing a different part of the cave. Tours left frequently during the day, but as lunch wound down, I started to worry that the early afternoon tours might be filling up.

I needn’t have worried. All the good tours had been long been sold out.

By the time we got to the visitor center, the only tour left was the 30-minute, self-guided “discovery” tour. That is, the tour that has no functional limits on capacity. Five years ago, it hadn’t been necessary to book a tour in advance. Apparently, Mammoth Cave has gotten more popular over the last half-decade, because these days, tours sell out fast online. You’ve got to book ahead if you want a spot!

I was crushed. A whole day trip into Kentucky with the goal of seeing Mammoth Cave, and all the good tours were sold out. I’m usually pretty good at planning ahead when traveling, but this time, I got beat. I had even considered booking a tour in advance, but I hadn’t wanted to tie us down to a particular arrival time. Lesson learned.

The girls, however, were great sports. They enjoyed the heck out of the “discovery” tour, oohing and aahing at the underground rock formations, and walking arm in arm chatting and singing to each other. We took pictures (the girls getting some more use out of those cameras I bought them for the Wyoming trip), we listened to park rangers, we read signs about the history of the caves. Sure, the whole thing only lasted maybe 40 minutes, but the girls enjoyed all of it.

Sometimes, I get reminded how blessed I am with these girls. They could have pitched a fit about our too-short cave tour, but they didn’t. They put on a couple of smiles and made the best of the situation. I couldn’t help but cheer up (and get over my own disappointment) watching them.

For those of you reading this considering a trip to Mammoth Cave, be sure to book your tour in advance. And be sure to bring jackets. It was cold down there! The temperature made for an eerie effect leaving the cave. Just at the top of the steps leading to the Historic Entrance, there was a thick layer of mist, hovering a fixed altitude. As soon as we passed through the mist, on our way up, we could feel the summer weather hit us again. Apparently, the cool, dry air from the cave hits the warm, humid air of the forest above in a very consistent way, creating this stable cloud of mist. It really neat, although it fogged up my glasses in no time at all.

With our cave exploration shorter than planned, I wasn’t sure how to spend the afternoon in Kentucky. I considered hiking around the superterranean portion of Mammoth Cave National Park (there are a ton of trails there), but about the time we exited the mist, we started hearing reports of thunderstorms on the way. So we headed back to the visitor center to wait out the rain. Us and about a thousand other people, making for cramped quarters while the thunderstorm passed. The girls and I saw every exhibit in the visitor center museum, and took our time exploring all the gift shops. Again, I couldn’t believe what good sports the girls were, although I guess spending half an hour shopping isn’t really a sacrifice for them.

To recap: No white squirrels. No big tour of Mammoth Cave. I had one more stop on my itinerary, and I was really hoping that Roadside America hadn’t given me bad info about this next attraction. Even though the girls and I were having fun, I needed a win for the day! And I was not disappointed this time. We made our way to Munfordville, Kentucky, maybe 25 minutes up the road from Mammoth Cave, and there, as promised by Roadside America, was Kentucky Stonehenge! It’s a loose replica of the original Stonehenge in England, built by some enterprising man in his backyard. (He’s got a pretty big backyard.)

Per my policy, I hadn’t told the girls what to expect in Munfordville, so it was a lot of fun to hear their reactions when we pulled into this guy’s driveway and they spotted Kentucky Stonehenge. There was a light rain, so the 12-year-old stayed in the car, but the 8-year-old and I ran around taking lots of pictures of the odd attraction. This wasn’t the first time the 8-year-old and I did something like this, and I suspect that when I’m old and gray, I’ll often remember these moments of father and daughter bonding over photography, running around some strange place with our cameras looking for interesting angles. Again, blessed.

Having successfully seen something on our list of Kentucky attractions, we started heading for home. It was dinner time, however, so we stopped at a Denny’s not far from Munfordville. The girls, as I realized, had never eaten at Denny’s. I’m not a huge fan of Denny’s, but they have one of the funniest corporate Twitter accounts around, so I figured that warranted a stop. The food was great, the service was… a little odd. It did, however, provide for one of the weirdest moments of the trip — and this was a trip that involved spotting a knight in shining armor and several tiny dinosaurs on display outside a roadside souvenir stand.

The 12-year-old ordered the chicken strips appetizer, which the menu said was “served with celery and your choice of dipping sauce.” She told the waiter that she wanted ranch dressing for her celery.  When her food came out, she got her ranch dressing, but there was no celery to be found. The 12-year-old, being the confident yet polite young woman she is (again, blessed), asked the waiter to bring her some celery. He apologized and headed back to the kitchen. When he returned, he had no celery with him. Why not? “Well, we’re not out of celery, we just don’t have any.”

“We’re not out of celery, we just don’t have any.”

The waiter wandered off, and the three of us looked at each other, confused. What did that mean? How could Denny’s not have any celery yet not be out of celery? The 8-year-old broke our silence with a very well timed “Whaaa–?!” and we all busted out laughing. I still don’t know what the waiter meant (maybe that particular Denny’s never had any celery to begin with?), but the girls continue to talk about our Denny’s celery incident and laugh!

I’m not sure what adventure the girls and I will go on next, but given how much fun we had on our day trip to Kentucky, when two of our three stops weren’t what I had hoped, I’m sure we’ll have a good time.