Day Twenty Three: Obstacles

We had a beautiful plan in place as evening fell on Day 22, Wednesday, the second to last day of the trip. After an evening on the town in Nashville,

we awoke comfortably late and proceeded two hours north to Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park.

At Mammoth we spelunked down into the aptly named caverns, which held many interesting tales of geologic and human history. The gigantic passageways were worn away over millions of years by water, and they have been in use by humans for several thousand years. In U.S. history, they were mined for gunpowder in the War of 1812, and the first non-Native Americans to master their labyrinthine contents were slaves of the cave's owner. These slaves eventually became Mammoth's first tour guides. They offered to burn the names of those they led into the ceiling, for a fee.

Now the National Park Service runs the cave, and we joined over 100 people on a highlights tour.

We intended to camp for the night at Mammoth, but it was only 4:30 when we finished the tour, so we resolved to get closer to home to decrease the drive home on Thursday.

A few phone calls yielded some free lodging with a Kenyon friend in Dayton, but alas it was not to be. We suffered a flat tire on the highway in Louisville.

After installing the donut, we drove around the city's environs for two hours in search of a place that could give us a replacement tire. At 8pm it seemed that every establishment closed before we could get there.

Even Walmart.

So it was an inconvenient time, and now we sit in our motel in Louisville. As soon as we get the spare tire, we will be on the road back to rainy PA.