Happy New Year and . . . We’re Back!

After another enforced four-month stay in Cincinnati, while Mike got a diagnosis of an extruded disc, then back surgery (on Halloween), and a couple of months of recuperation, followed by the holiday season, we finally managed to hook up the Scamp and get back on the road a couple of days ago.

We spent three months in a furnished apartment in Westwood while Mike had the surgery and then got back on his feet. It was a nice place, but unfortunately we had a bowling team of buffaloes living upstairs and they drove us a little crazy. I think we weren’t meant for apartment living, but it was just another part of our experiment in capricious living situations in the previous 15 months since we sold our house on Covedale.

The apartment house in Westwood where we
lived from October through December 2025

It was somewhat portentous that the weather, which had been a balmy 70 degrees when we started packing up, plummeted to the low 20s, complete with snow flurries, when we rescued the camper and packed up the van and the Scamp. Windy and VERY cold, we did the packing fast and even so my fingers came perilously close to frostbite. But we survived and got back on the road the second last day of the year, with a short hop from Harrison, Ohio, to Elizabethtown, Kentucky. We don’t want to stress out Mike’s back, but the short drive was fine.

From Elizabethtown, we drove south for an hour to Mammoth Cave National Park. If I am remembering right, I was there in 1964 with my parents and my sister Vali, and in 1996 with Mike and Alice and Cyrus. So apparently I visit Mammoth Cave approximately every 30 years. This was a fine visit; we took a two-hour tour that accessed the cave by way of an elevator that took an entire minute to descend. A minute is actually a long time to be on an elevator, and the ranger who was our guide entertained us with tales of what to do if the elevator broke down. That was fun. But it worked just fine, and we headed down a dimly lit corridor to the Snowball Room, which I remembered very clearly from my visit in 1964. I am pretty sure we ate lunch there; it was a cafeteria style lunchroom back then. Some of the equipment is still there, but it’s not a place for dining any more.

We walked about a mile back Cleaveland Avenue, as it is known, named for a geology professor named Parker Cleaveland, not the city in Ohio. We had all the usual fun cave activities and sights; of course the ranger turned off the lights so we could see just how dark it was down there, and with the lights on we also saw gypsum formations on the ceiling and signatures from some of the earliest visitors to the cave (writing your name on the wall is frowned upon now).

  

                 Some of the gypsum formations         Signatures on the walls were left  
                 look organic, but are all                            by visitors to the cave in the 1800s

                 mineral deposits                            

We also experienced a more unusual occurrence—we could hear a kind of humming noise, air from outside being forced through small cracks, probably, and the ranger said he had been told it was a B-flat note/vibration. One of the people in our group was a choir teacher, and the ranger let us gather around her right off the path and all hum the same note. It was very interesting in a weird and solemn way.

On our way back to the elevator, we saw a cave cricket and a cave beetle on the wall. The cave beetle was too tiny to show up in a photograph—it’s about the size of an ant—but the cave cricket posed nicely for a portrait. The guide told us that the beetles eat the cricket eggs, which is good, because otherwise the cave would be completely full of crickets.

A cave cricket we saw at Mammoth Cave

After we got back up to the surface, we returned to the visitors’ center and walked down to the main (and first discovered) natural entrance to the cave. There are other entrances, both natural and man-made, in the park, but this is THE entrance. It was suitably dark and mysterious, although it does have a staircase leading down to it now. Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world, standing at 426 miles of mapped passages now (with lots more still to be discovered and mapped, we were told), but an interesting thing I didn’t remember hearing on earlier trips was that the cave passages are at many different levels; a map of them is necessarily 3D, with at least six levels of  passages, including the underground rivers and lakes.

The natural main entrance to Mammoth Cave

Another thing we learned at the visitors’ center was that the land above Mammoth Cave originally was settled by early pioneers, many of whom had fought in the Revolutionary War and received land grants in the area. We also heard that the Mammoth Cave stagecoach was robbed by Jesse James and his gang (they really got around, robbing banks and trains and stagecoaches from Oklahoma to West Virginia). The descendants of the early settles either sold the land to the government or, in many cases, it was taken by eminent domain when the area became the national park it is today. Congress authorized the national park in 1926 and it was officially opened on July 1, 1941. The exhibits at the visitors’ center included some quilts that had belonged to the people who lived there before it was a park. You can find quilts everywhere!

Quilts exhibited at the Mammoth Cave visitors’ center

Our planned trip back to the Texas Gulf coast had been through Arkansas and eastern Texas, but it was, as mentioned, very cold when we left, and we changed our plan after the stop at Mammoth Cave. We’ve decided to head straight south through Tennessee and Alabama in search of warmer weather. We will turn west after camping on the Mississippi coast for a few days. At least that is the plan for now.