As Summer vacation time comes to an end we have realized that our trips of any distance will dwindle. With this in mind we started looking at where we could go for that one last hoorah. We quickly realized that there was another national park within just a few hours and we needed to check it off our list. Fortunately we were able to get a campsite close and tickets for a tour into the Earth to see……..could there be ghosts inside Mammoth Cave?

MAMMOTH CAVE NATIONAL PARK

South Central Kentucky holds vast underground caverns and passageways including the longest known cave in the WORLD!!!! To date there have been just over 400 miles of the cave documented and experts still don’t know where Mammoth Cave ends! The National Park Service offers several tours into the cave system but unfortunately for our visit there were only a handful actually being conducted.

For our tour we chose the Historic Modified Tour that took just over 2 hours to complete. The tour is ranger led and we were given quite a bit of information about the history of the cave and its uses over the last 200+ years. There are a couple spots along the tour that are somewhat narrow and several places where I had to duck walk but overall there were no struggles on this particular tour. The kids really enjoyed the stories and talks from the ranger while I spent my time trying to locate the oldest inscription on the walls!!!

Most of the pathways on the tour we took were concrete and well lighted but there were points when the rangers turned off the lights to help portray how the cave was in times past including talks of ghosts and hauntings. Whether you believe in ghosts or not is a completely different story but this cave definitely holds some things of question! My video from inside the cave showed things I didn’t even notice during the tour but I’ll let you be the judge! Could there be ghosts inside Mammoth Cave? Leave me a comment on what you see!

LINCOLN BIRTHPLACE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK

After packing up camp near Mammoth Cave we decided to add the extra half hour to our trip home and pay a visit to Honest Abe’s birthplace. This site is not really near anything so you’ll have to make sure to toss it on to another trip but it’s worth the hour or so to visit. The video in the information center is interesting about how the area came to be and it explains how the first Lincoln Memorial (on this site) became a monument.

The most interesting part of the park to me is the cabin that was reconstructed inside the memorial building. Apparently there has been disagreement since day one regarding the authenticity of the cabin and testing in the early 2000s determined the cabin dated to around 1865. This meant the cabin was not old enough to be Lincoln’s actual birthplace but it still shows the way life was in the area during his time.

CAMPING

There is an abundance of camping opportunities near Mammoth Cave from high end resorts to primitive style camping within the park. Not knowing the area and it being a last minute trip we chose to go with a name we know…….KOA. The closest KOA is in Horse Cave, Kentucky and is only 8 miles from the National Park. This KOA isn’t big but it definitely makes up with character. It has a small pool, a simple miniature golf course, playground and bounce pillow as most do but then they got creative. Keeping with the area this KOA added Conestoga wagons to stay in as well as the newest addition……TREE HOUSES!!!!! We even had ducks pay us a visit!

Overall this was an easy trip without a lot of extra time needed for any one thing. If we had thought things through a bit more we probably would have added a day to drive up to Louisville and visit the Louisville Slugger factory since J is so into baseball.

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