Today we are rolling out of Nashville, bound for Crossville, TN to visit Mark's co-worker Cindy, and then on to Asheville, North Carolina, a long driving day that will put us back in a place I have memories of. For the last two nights, we stayed outside Nashville at Cedars of Lebanon State Park, just south of I-40. First we looked at _______ State Park, about 20 miles north of Lebanon, but it was almost deserted of campers and had no visitor's center, you just put money in an envelope for your overnight stay. Mark vetoed it, so we drove around and found Cedars, which turned out to be very nice. But we almost hit an electrical box, a tree and a sign, trying to get into our spot there. Here's what happened...
After we registered, we were looking for which spot to take (the place was mostly empty), and I made a comment about parking not too far from the laundry, as it was very cold out and we had some loads to do. So, Mark pulled into the very next spot he saw, which was a good one. Well, it turned out to be a little too sharp of a turn for us: avoiding the electrical box on the driver's side meant getting extremely close to a little steel sign with our site number on it (perfect for scraping off paint) on the passenger's side. After missing the electrical box by less than an inch, there was a tree to contend with. Here's a picture of how close we were to the tree on the driver's side:
We were also that close to the little sign, on the passenger's side of our attached tow car. Mark got out and tried dislodging the car behind us, which was impossible, because of the angle (it has to be straight behind the RV to unconnect it). Then he had a brilliant idea: he pulled the sign out of the ground, so we could have more room to turn. Then he backed up a few feet, jackknifing our car behind us a little, which caused some rather disturbing screeching sounds from the car, and then pulled forward to straighten up. We were clear of the tree, our final obstacle. Then Mark remembered that he'd put the parking brake on in the car, and told me to release it so he could pull forward more. All of a sudden he got nervous. "the car's not in drive anymore; I put it into park when I tried to unattach it, and forgot to switch it back. The transmission may be shot." Well, luckily the car seems just fine, but that was the most complicated parking job, not to mention the closest we've come to wondering how the heck we'd ever get out of a spot (thank god he was able to pull out that sign!). The ground was so wet and leafy that we couldn't find the spot where the sign's hole had been--it's just leaning against a tree now. But for now, we still haven't christened the RV with a fender-bender.
We only had one day to explore the area, and we wanted to see Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, so we drove up there and took a two-hour guided tour (the Niagra Tour, they have about ten different tours, some of them very cool, like a tour where you get to crawl through tight openings and explore the cave with only headlamps and climb over stuff, things like that. They don't let toddlers on that one though.). Here are the pictures that came out:
There were 300 steps to descend on a very narrow staircase, to get into the horizontal parts of the cave. By the way, there are like 10 or 20 openings to Mammoth cave, which is 365 miles long (so far). About half of the openings, like this one which dates back to about 1910, are man made. This one was blasted with dynamite, from the bottom of the sinkhole we descended in the first picture, by a guy hoping to make some money taking tourists into the cave. He got lucky that his hole connected up with anything interesting. The staircase was narrow, which was great for Katie.
The ceilings were low, which was bad for Mark (I even hit my head once).
Here's our guide. He turned off the lights in this room at one point, and you literally could not see your hand right in front of your face. But one little lighter lit it enough for us to see everyone on the trip. It would have also been totally quiet, except there was a baby in a Baby Bjorn snoring on his daddy.
The horizontal rooms looked sort of like this (some were enormous though).
In the 19th century, they allowed visitors to scratch their names into the rock, for a tip paid to the tourguides, most of whom were black. Here's their graffiti.
There were some interesting formations, like stalagtites and flows, but really not anything like the beauty of Carlsbad Caverns, that we saw in New Mexico. This cave here is the biggest in the world by far, but not the prettiest.
After Mammoth, we drove into downtown Nashville and walked around the capital building and that area. On the way into town, there was this accident:
