So, the beginning of October saw us getting a few days of time out camping at Evangola State Park. We had some heavy rains on Wednesday and Thursday, and there was standing water at a number of the places in the campgrounds when I arrived on Thursday. Huzzah for wellies! (Especially with the standing water all along where I could position the door.)
Site 18 at Evangola State Park.
We got site 18 which was farther away from the cliffs than I would have wanted, but it was one of the few sites left for the weekend, which really surprised me. The loop that our site was on only had 3 other RV/campers parked when I arrived, and being that the main area of the loop is a big grassy field, they were easy to see.
A nice clean bus!
One upside of having participated in the Buffalo’s Mini-Maker Faire was that the bus was really nice, clean, and organized! The site was pretty nicely leveled, and had some nice woods right behind.
The view of/from the Master Bedroom.
After arriving, the rain tapered off enough that I could get a fire going, once I elevated things enough that they were above the water level. letting me cook dinner.
Cooking dinner over the fire!I mog di = I like you! (in Bavarian)
While I was doing that, I was visited by a woman with a bit of an accent who asked a bit about the bus. It turned out that she was from Bavaria, and travelling with her parents. After a bit of back and forth, they ended up coming over for a nice evening with some wine and conversation. As they left the next morning, they gave me a lovely Bavarian Oktoberfest cookie (decorated gingerbread!).
The windstorm over that night made the beach into a more interesting place. The beach at Evangola has a base of a shelf of shale, and the huge waves had pushed/pulled the sand away and exposed the stone below. Again, good waterproof boots made for an enjoyable walk, and as the sun came out, the sighting of some fossil wood in the shale!
Evangola Beach without so much beach …Just offshore at the beach, a fossilized branch or small tree trunk?)
The rest of the day was full of relaxing, cooking, and hiking along the cliff trail and beach. Meanwhile, back at the campgrounds, the sites quickly filled, to the point that it looked like a summer weekend, not a cool one in the fall!
The calm after the storm – looking at the beach from the cliff trail.
The clear water over the clean shale-layered shelf.
There was also time enough for a game of Affliction: Salem 1692, a game that we picked up at UBCon a couple of years ago.
A nice game of Affliction: Salem 1692
Later we had some fire- and candlelight for the bus.
The bus by firelight.
The next day we stayed to take a class on making tetrahedral kites, and made one out of recycled/used materials before going home.
Once again, this was an enjoyable trip. But, next time we come, I want to make sure that we get a cliff-side site for that spectacular view, and the sound of the surf.
So, we finally made it along the narrow Kentucky roads to Mammoth Cave National Park. The place was tucked back in some lovely forested hills, and the Visitor Center was very well attended. So well attended, in fact, that there was only about 2/3rd of a single RV spot left to park in, as most of them were filled with cars! As I parked in as tightly as I could, and went back to see if cars could get by. I wasn’t as happy as I could have been, but upon starting to walk to the Center, I noted that someone was heading for the bus, and it turned out they were moving the car in front of it, so I moved the bus up and was much more comfortably parked.
At the beginning of the path looking up toward the level of the Visitor Center.
We hit the well appointed bathrooms, then went to see about tours. I had done some research on the tours, when looking at Mammoth Cave as a destination, but not about making advance reservations. All but the self-guided walking tour of the shallowest, historic cave entrance tour were sold out! So, we got our tickets and made our way to the entrance, which was down a fairly steep path from the center.
The park is in south central Kentucky, and consists not only of the caves, but an area of the Green River valley (and hills around it). The geology is a limestone ‘karst’, where the groundwaters seep into the limestone bedrock and erode it away, letting groundwaters flow deeper underground, sometimes creating underground lakes and destabilizing more bedrock causing rockfalls, or for the waters to find even deeper paths to follow. These can create cave systems as waters flow to greater depths, and previously used in/outflows are left dry and unused by the water.
Mammoth Cave is the longest surveyed system, stretching more than 390 miles with potential for as much as a 1000 mile system. This length is determined as having a way for a human to climb/swim through naturally existing openings, but not through active mining activities.
Heading down into the caves.
The historic entrance is where we entered, walking over a shoe cleaning pad (because of the white nose fungus that attacks bats) and then down a stairway to get us down into the caves. While this entrance looks massive, there are places just inside the baffle doors where it’s less than 6 feet tall and you have to watch your head.
Plenty of space.
But then you wind around a curve, and the whole thing opens up. Quite a bit of the cave along through here was mined for calcium nitrate (saltpeter) during the War of 1812, but was later used briefly as a tuberculosis hospital, as well as a tourist attraction.
I’m in this picture for scale …
While we could only explore a small amount of the miles and miles of cave, But that was kind of okay, as the cave was kind of chilly compared to the hot, sunny, summer day outside. We chatted with some of the park rangers who were explaining about the caves and answering questions, and spent an hour and a half or so inside the cave.
Where the River Styx comes aboveground.
While the caves are the main attraction of the park, there are lots of trails that cover the hills too. We spent some time walking further down from the historic entrance toward the Green River (which used to have a riverboat stop), where we turned aside to see where the ‘River Styx’ exits the cave complex at its deepest levels.
Our son said it was either named by a dog, or someone with a low sense of humor …
After some more hiking around and then climbing back up to the Visitor’s Center, we get back onto the bus and headed off to our stop for the night. It was a short trip on the smaller roads to get out to I-65, and then it was an easy trip to I-71, then another short trip on the smaller roads to get to Big Bone Lick, which we arrived at just before dark!
Some of a bison bison recovered from the salt lick.
Big Bone Lick is actually a place where salt deposits from the evaporation of an ancient sea are getting redissolved into underground springs which bring the saline water to the surface.
They have a friendly giant sloth at the museum.
Animals would come to the area to literally lick at the ground, but the moist soil in some areas would be like a quicksand that the animals ( including forms of bison, caribou, deer, elk, horse, mammoth, mastodon, moose, musk ox, peccary, sloth, and possibly tapir) who gathered could get mired in, and after they sank in, the salty soils could help preserve the bones from decomposition. Plenty of prominent people (like Lewis and Clark) came during the 1700’s & 1800’s for scientific investigation and study of the remains.
The campgrounds were pretty nice, with each site having electric hookups and every two sites sharing water hookups where we were. That said, there were rules about not washing dishes by the hookups or in the restrooms, so we took our dirty dishes with us, not having the plumbing tanks in place.
A nice view from the bedroom.
The sites backed up on some nice greenery, though some had some significant slope. I used some 2x material to level us up. Just at the top of the hill, at the end of the loop, was a trail that led along to the Visitor’s Center/museum and the bison pasture.
Live bison, not fossils.
We spent some of the morning at the museum, and then watching the bison. They have a nice-sized herd, with both adults and young.
It’s waffle time!
After this, we set off to make our way to Buffalo. We did make a stop at a Waffle House in Ohio, but otherwise we made the trip in good time. While it was (surprise) dark when we got home, we were back, and all worked out well for us on the trip – it was a success!
So, we spent another full day at Fort Massac after the Eclipse, and it was the day that the rain finally came and the heat and humidity broke. Most of the people in the campground also left that morning, so it was a nice quiet day.
We got in some bike-riding and wandering once things cooled down. It did mean that more bugs came out, but we had local volunteers helping us with that.
Our son found a painted rock that someone had left on the (now vacant) site just north of ours. It was really cute, and was a fun find that made our day just that much brighter.
You rock!Keep or Hide. (We left it there.)Down at Fort Massac’s boat launch in the evening.
Of course, the sun coming out again after the rain was nice as well. We made it down to the river again, and walked down to get some Ohio River mud on our shoes.
Nice dramatic clouds in the sunset too!
But as nice as it was to have the cooler weather, we set off the next day fairly early (and as we’d filled up just outside Paducah, we had a full tank to start with) because we were off to hit Mammoth Caves!
A Kentucky Police Pick-up Truck?
It was a wonderful day for a trip, being sunny with some light clouds, and cool enough that I didn’t have to really worry about the engine’s temperature, even though our trip was mostly uphill! We did see some interesting stuff on our way, though, like the Police Pick-up Truck. In Buffalo (and as much of New York law enforcement that I’ve seen) SUVs and vans are the only real non-sedan light vehicles, so this was an oddity worth a picture.
The TVA Paradise Fossil Power Plant.
The other was the cooling towers of the TVA Paradise Fossil Plant. Some research after the fact shows that this coal-powered plant, located just east of Drakesboro, has the largest megawatt capacity of any power plant in the state. We could see the plumes of steam really clearly from the Western Kentucky Parkway.
We stayed on the Parkway until we got to US231, which we took until we got to KY70, which really got me a bit nervous at first. I didn’t mind the hills or the curves, but rather the fact that there was really no shoulder to these roads. Meeting any kind of large vehicle was a sort of test of nerves of jockeying between the ditch and clipping someone’s mirror. But it was some lovely countryside when there wasn’t any oncoming traffic.
And driving on these smaller roads would end up being great experience for getting to our campsite later that night when it was getting dark.
But finally, we made it to Mammoth Cave National Park. (Which I’ll discuss in Part 9.)
The clear water over the clean shale-layered shelf.
The 
We got in some bike-riding and wandering once things cooled down. It did mean that more bugs came out, but we had local volunteers helping us with that.
