Day 59/60 (Sunday/Monday, August 22nd/23rd) Mammoth Cave/Lexington

Today we drove from Nashville, Tennessee to Lexington, Kentucky. Along the way, we stopped at Mammoth Cave. We've already been in Carlsbad Caverns N.P and Wind Cave N.P. so we thought we'd finish by touring the longest cave system in the world. Mammoth Cave was carved by an underground river (which is still there in the deeper parts) and the explored parts total 392 connected miles. If you combined the 2nd and 3rd longest caves in the world Mammoth would still be bigger by quite a ways. This was the first cave system we toured where you actually had to be a bit flexible to get through. The cave has parts called "Tall Man's Agony" and "Fat Man's Misery" and they were aptly named; even Kim hit her head on one part and we all had to crouch and twist to get through those parts. The boys both enjoyed our contortions because they were small enough to fit through most places. We covered a couple of miles during the tour and marveled at the differences in the formations and appearances of cave systems we'd visited. When we got back to the surface, we finished our day's travel to Lexington and made camp. Kim's family has relatives in Lexington so we made contact and agreed to meet for dinner tomorrow night.

We were camped at the Kentucky Horse Park. It turned out that the campground was one of the nicer ones in Kentucky and it had a huge swimming pool that the guys put to good use. The nice thing about the campground was that it's attached to the actual Horse Park. On Monday, we bought tickets to the horse park and went to tour the grounds. We got a horse-drawn trolley ride of the grounds to get familiarized and then walked around looking at the exhibits. There was a special on-loan exhibit about Arabian horses and a parade of breeds where the riders were dressed in period-clothes to represent the riders of those breeds. For example, the rider of the Percheron was dressed as Joan of Arc and the rider of the Thoroughbred was dressed as a jockey. After that we watched Hall of Champions, where they paraded past great champion race horses past the audience. It was obvious that the horses still enjoyed the attention and applause! There were memorials for some great champion race horses and the grave and memorial for Man-O-War, the greatest race horse that ever lived. He was only beaten once in his career and that was a fluke of position. He defeated the horse that beat him in seven other races. It was a fun day that we capped off by driving into Lexington for dinner with family. We were in for a surprise because we'd expected dinner with a few people, but instead, it was almost the whole Kentucky clan that gathered to have dinner with us. We ended up with 14 people at dinner!

We had a wondeful time, but we've also begun to realize that our wonderful trip is drawing to an end. Tomorrow, we'll head out for West Virgina, our last stop before returning home.