We said our goodbyes to our new house and headed north for the summer. The trip to Crawfordsville IN is about 1100 miles and it will take us 9 days. That is 5 days of actual moving of around 200 miles each day and 4 days of exploring as we go.
Our first stop was at the Casey Jones RV Park in Lake City Florida at around 220 miles. Here we spent part of the day exploring a local antique shop. This is one of those huge places with around 100 little vendor stalls. We found some stuff that we would consider putting in the Florida house.
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| Our site at Casey Jones |
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| A pretty cool toy someone had in the park! |
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| Some interesting ideas for the house in Florida. |
Travel day 2 we ended up at the Interstate Campground & RV Center in Byron Georgia at around 200 miles. On our one day exploring here in Byron GA we had dinner a local fish restaurant that mostly only the locals know about.
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| Our site at the Interstate Park in Georgia. Patty getting water for our pet plant Rosey |
The restaurant was called Jim Shaw's. I had the catfish and it was really good! Patty had the fish fry of Haddock and she said that was good too. The most surprising thing here was the hush puppies, they were the best we have ever had! Patty is not a fan but she liked them too. So this turned out to be a nice dinner out having fried fish.
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| Never had a UFO before. Not very good actually |
Travel Day 3 took us to the Holiday Travel Park in Rossville Georgia at a little over 200 miles. Actually this park is just 2 blocks from the Tennessee border and, in fact the name of the RV Park is the Holiday Travel Park Chattanooga TN. We didn’t know it when we picked this RV Park but we had stayed here before a few years ago. We had already done most of our exploring here then. This area is known for Lookout Mountain and Civil War sites. We just chilled here and took on some shopping at the local Walmart.
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| This is the second one of these we have encountered and both times have been this travel season! |
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| They look like they would be heavy to travel with! |
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| This marker is in the RV Park. So the park is sitting on actual Civil War grounds! |
Day 4 of our travels took us to the Singing Hills Campground in Kentucky at about 235 miles. This area is known for Mammoth Cave National Park. We have been by this area many times in the past 6 years but it just never worked out for us to visit. This was the time for us to visit the Cave!
When we arrived at the Singing Hills Park the owner asked if we were here to see the cave. After saying we were he asked if we had reservations and no, we did not. We took the owners advice and went to the cave right after we set up to see if we could get in a tour.
The cave has 7 major tours you can take and they book up fast especially on the weekend like it is now. It was a good thing too that we went as there were just 2 tours left, one at 6:30 pm and one at 2pm the next day. We reserved the 2 pm Historic tour that is just about 3 hours long.
We arrived at Mammoth Cave National Park Visitor Center at noon on Sunday a couple of hours before our tour at 2 pm. The visitor center has a couple of gift shops and a good free museum. The museum and gift shop and a trip to the restroom before the tour took up most of the time before the tour started.
Before we entered the cave the tour guide gave a talk describing the tour and safety precautions while in the cave. I was especially interested in areas that may be tight as I am quite claustrophobic! There are a couple of areas that are quite tight but they are short and open up to very large area right after. I should be OK, I think.
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| We had to walk a bit to the entrance to the cave. This is our tour group walking in the 90 degree heat to the nice cool entrance to the cave |
The tight places turned out to be fine for me. Just one place called Fat Man's Revenge just about freaked me out. It wasn’t that the walls were just a couple inches away from my head on all sides, it was that we stopped in the middle because a little kid of about 10 had to poop! But still, did we need to stop in one of the tightest spots! Just about the time I was starting to panic we started to move again, whew!
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| Ahh... the air is very cool coming out of the entrance here! |
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| The ranger turned out all of the lights except for this lantern for us to see how dark it is in the cave. It took quite a while to get everyone to extinguish their cell phones though! |
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| At one time and before the cave was a national park people could write on the cave walls for a fee. The fees for writing on the walls helped to pay for the upkeep of the cave tours. |
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| This is where I just about had a panic attack! This is called Fat Man's Revenge and it is very tight. We were stopped here because some kid in the tour had to take a dump. |
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| This is the way out! We are something like 350 feet underground and are now going to climb these flights of stairs to the surface! |
The tour and cave were actually very cool, both literally and attraction wise. I hadn’t been in the cave for over 30 years so I really didn’t remember much about it. And this was Patty’s first time in the cave. We both really liked it.
The tour was quite a bit of walking at about 4 miles and the last half mile was basically straight up out of the cave! You couldn’t beat the nice inside temperature of just 57 when the outside was a little over 90 either! We would definitely recommend this cave to anybody as a great destination.
Our last day, day 5 of travel was our longest at about 260 miles. Usually, I stop and refuel along the way at this distance but we made the trip with about 10 miles of fuel to go, plenty of reserve! I probably would not have pushed the fuel that hard if we were stopping in unfamiliar surroundings but we were stopping in my childhood hometown of Crawfordsville Indiana. Since Indiana is on Eastern Standard Time and Kentucky is Central time we got an extra hour for this long trip. With the extra hour we arrived around 3 pm and were set up by 4 pm and having dinner with the grandkids by 5pm.
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| The bridge over the Ohio River that separates Kentucky from Indiana in Louisville KY. |
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| Downtown Crawfordsville IN with the brand new clock tower on the Montgomery County Courthouse. The area residents collected donations for the past few years to have a new clock tower added to the courthouse. The original was removed during WWII with the old bell melted down for the war effort. The town looks very different when entering it now. The town looks finished now! |
Our time here is for visiting with my family. I have a sister Diana, a brother Roger, a son Tony, and we have three Grandkids Alivia 11, Savannah 15, and Bailey 16. I also have several cousins here too we will probably visit.
OK, that is it for this post. Next post will be after we take a trip to Cedar Falls Amusement part with our youngest grandkid Alivia in a couple weeks.
Stay tuned!
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