Arriving in Kentucky
Leaving the baby goats behind, we continued our North West. Within a few short minutes of driving a brown sign was inviting us to stop in at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. Here we were able to drop the trailer at the visitor’s center, drive the truck up to the top of the mountain, and peer back down for our last look at Tennessee. It being a dog friendly park we all got out onto the trail out to the overlook before settling into the truck for the drive to our week’s destination. The gap – just a notch in the small mountain range which was easier to travel through on foot then the higher peaks – was the border of the three (!!!) states of Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. The highway passing through was in Tennessee, the parking lot for the hike was in Kentucky, and the overlook that we hiked out too was in Virginia. I’ve never been to Virginia…
While hitching back up in the visitor’s center parking lot, parked in one of the only dozen or so places a trailer or bus can park, a small passenger car pulls up next to us and parks in a RV parking space, even though it is further from the visitor’s center, and there are literally dozens of car-spaces available. I snapped… and walked up to the car, tapped on the window and calmly exclaimed, “It only takes a few more passenger cars to park in the RV spaces like you did to prevent any RV or bus from parking here. There are many other places for you to park, yet we have only these very few spots. Can you please think of others and park in a normal space?” I figured that was about as polite as I was going to get. They did move. I firmly believe that the NPS Rangers should be issuing tickets to these people. I will no longer sit quietly while they do this extremely selfish act. I plan to confront everyone person I see doing it.
We arrived in Elizabethtown, KY expecting to stay two full weeks since we had all of Bourbon Country and Mammoth Cave National Park to explore. Elizabethtown was roughly in the middle of all of that adventuring, or so we thought, which is why it was our destination. Although Elizabethtown was nothing more than a launching point to these other places, it did turn out to serve us well, with regular visits to the gym down the street, oil change on the truck, and a coffee shop or two for some extreme downloading of movies and TV shows.
We passed yet another surprise National Park on the way into town so I set out to conquer it, by myself, on the very next day. Abraham Lincoln’s Birthplace is a tiny park with a big job. Since the early 1900’s a small log cabin has been protected within the four walls of a building – the first memorial to Lincoln. The cabin was moved to this location from elsewhere in Kentucky and for over 100 years this cabin was pitched as Lincoln’s birth-cabin. Yet, in 2004, after dating the wood the NPS found that the wood used to build the cabin was from the 1860’s! Now the placards around the cabin simply state it is a cabin “like” Lincoln’s cabin. And that is about as dramatic as this park got. I even had to enter the memorial building using the back entrance as the iconic front entrance was being repaired.
