Hello from Mammoth Cave! On our way back north we stopped at Mammoth Cave again. We have been here before but wanted to see other parts of the cave and see my Godparents, the Parsons, who live in Bowling Green. Regretfully I failed to take a picture of the four of us while we were at their home. We enjoyed a lovely meal together and great company!
One of the tours we took was the Great Onyx Lantern tour. It was cool to go through the cave using only the lantern lights. I can't even imagine those first explorers digging and crawling sometimes with only a small candle's worth of light!
We saw stalactites, stalagmites, gypsum crystals, and helictites all while hearing about how this particular cave was quite the "tourist trap" back in the day. This cave was on private property for years before becoming part of the National Park. The family would charge $1 to go see the cave and then half way thru charge another $1 to get out! I doubt they would have gotten away with that in today's TripAdvisor/Google reviews world!
Our second day we did the Historic tour which you enter through the natural entrance to Mammoth Cave. You can see why they call it that when it truly is "mammoth" on the inside. This tour included over 500 stairs down into the deepest part of the cave and while many spots were wide open we also went thru "Fat man's misery" which was pretty skinny and several places you had to duck to not hit your head. Upon exiting the cave tour we were greeted with a downpour of rain! I am not talking about a drizzle but a "gully washer" as Dave's mom would call it! Check out the water going into the "overflow" even. It made the waterfall a spectacular site but boy, were we drenched!
We went to the Visitors center and toured the museum part until it let up enough for us to go to our campsite. Sure glad we didn't have a tent, as those people came back to their sites being under water!
On our way to the Arch we stopped for the night in Vincennes to visit with some new RV friends we had met in Red Bay, AL while having some work done on Phoebe. Vincennes is their hometown as well as the birthplace of Red Skelton. Bill and Cinda were lovely hosts and showed us around town and had a great dinner together.
On to the Arch! It really is an imposing structure when you get next to it. On the contrary, the ride up to the top is a pretty small space. The door into the car on the right is only 4' tall so just like we were back in the cave, we had to duck to get in.
Inside wasn't much bigger and you had to ride with 4 people total, which is pretty cozy when you have never met the other 2 people. We had 2 students from China who didn't speak much English. Made for a long 4 minute ride up and 3 minutes back down.
The view from the top is way cool, looking out at the National Park grounds, the city of St. Louis and the Mississippi river ( I like the shadow from the arch in this picture).
The windows you can look out from are quite small but the information about the Arch and how it was engineered and built was quite fascinating. You could spend hours in the museum part of the park.
We visited the Old Cathedral, which has amazing architecture as well but oddly enough no stained glass windows. The ceiling treatment was just beautiful!
We walked the entire grounds of the park which gave us some great shots of the Arch along the way.
We, of course, hit downtown to see more of the sights but mainly to get some famous St. Louis ribs! Dave was certainly a happy camper at Sugarfire ribs and had enough for left overs the next night.
We thought our campground would be close enough to walk (it was just on the other side of the river) but the road wasn't conducive to walking. It did, however give us a nice view of the Arch.
Our final stop before the end of our trip was to Indiana Dunes National Park. Dave sort of "poo-poed" it because as we are now so close to home and have places like Rosy Mound close by us, but I found it to be quite lovely! Our campsite was amazing and we could walk right to the beach on this lush green trail filled with wildflowers. Apparently one of the things that makes the park so unique is the biosphere that allows plants and wildlife that can be found from way north as well as from way south. Site 22 was perfect as it was fully paved and was just 2 sites down from the hiking trail. The wildflowers along the path were spectacular and reminded us of being in the Smoky Mountains in the spring. Enjoy these last photos of the flowers and finally the beach and dunes. Hard to believe we've been gone 336 nights in the RV and then home to Grand Haven! Thank you so much for your continued prayers and reading our our blog. We are only home 2 days and the next adventure begins so stayed tuned for more blog posts to come!
