August 25, 2020
One of our annual trips is an easy drive out to Fairfield Glade, TN for a few days with Greg’s side of the family, and this year we combined it with a visit to Mammoth Cave National Park in KY. Our 4th national park, in case anyone else is counting.
Our time in Fairfield Glade is always enjoyable. It’s an absolutely gorgeous golf area with a lot of fun family activities. This year we paddled around the lake in a giant duckling paddle boat, visited the pool a few times, had some great Mexican food, took a family pontoon boat ride, and hiked around the neighborhood. We also found a movie that was filmed in the area and watched it together! (Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper; a black & white film from the 1940’s about the most highly decorated soldier of WWII.)
One of our days in TN, we packed a picnic lunch and drove north toward Kentucky. We were headed for Mammoth Cave National Park, but when we saw a sign for the Alvin York State Park, we couldn’t resist a quick detour. Sergeant York’s original homestead, as well as his local church and cemetery, has been turned into a Tennessee state park, complete with a visitor center modeled after a “general store” from the same time period. We stopped, visited the York house (which was locked), and then hiked over to the cemetery to see Alvin York’s tombstone. I grew up watching the movie with my family, so it was pretty cool to see real places from the story! Highly recommend if you’ve never seen it.
Back on the road, we reached Mammoth Cave around noon. After a quick lunch, we arrived at the Historic tour entrance for a safety briefing before (carefully) walking down 135 steps to enter the cave. We chose the self-guided Discovery tour because of how small our toddlers are, although there’s a wide range of exciting tour opportunities for anyone wanting to get lost and/or stuck inside a narrow cave passageway.
It was about a thousand degrees outside but mid-50’s inside. Eva has a cute habit of guzzling water on road trips and then overflowing her diaper, but this time I didn’t have extra shorts for her, so we bundled her in Greg’s jacket and started our 2-mile walk around the cave. I’m not big on caves but it was interesting to contrast this one with our visit to Luray Caverns earlier this month. Luray is a “wet” cave (with stalactites and stalagmites formed by slowly dripping water) but Mammoth Cave is a “dry” cave. I think the idea is that a huge underground river formed the cave long ago. It felt like being in a subway station, without the train track.
The most eventful part of our cave tour was when I started having sharp Braxton Hicks contractions every few minutes. Greg & I both briefly panicked as we pictured getting lost underground and having the baby there! I ended up skipping the second half of the tour and waiting for everyone on a bench. Thankfully we made it out and back to Fairfield Glade.
Not our favorite park but we were happy to check it off the list!
=)