My Travel Memories, Lexington (and probably Louisville), Kentucky

This is going to be a short one, because I don’t remember much.  I’m not even sure that Lexington was our next stop after Springfield.  At this point in our 1980 vacation, we took one of my dad’s road trips with him.  The cities he needed to visit and thus we covered were Lexington, Louisville, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Detroit.  Lexington might have been the day that my mom and I sat in the car outside the building where my dad was working.  Or was that Louisville?  Literally all I remember of those two cities was dinner.  In Louisville, we went to an Italian restaurant, I think.

And then there was dinner in Lexington.  We had dinner at a dinner theater in Lexington.  I was a young teenager and had been to the theater, by my count, around four times before, but this may have been my first dinner theater experience. As we left the theater, I saw a sort of receiving line for the actors and, figuring that this was the thing to do, I got in line.  I told them that I had had a good time and that they had done a good job.  My mom was pretty surprised by this, since I was kind of a shy kid.  But I figured “when in Rome,” and the Romans seemed to be doing this, so why not?

Since I don’t remember the order we actually visited the cities in, I threw them into Google Maps and will be doing them in that order.  So, next up (January 12?) will be Cincinnati, followed by Columbus and then Detroit.

ETA: I had the worst time scheduling this post.  First I forgot to schedule it at all, so it appeared for a minute as a new post, and then I accidentally scheduled it for January 4, 2015.  It should be okay now.

My Travel Memories: Mammoth Cave National Park, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky

While trying to remember all of the places we stopped at on our way to Florida, there are places that I returned to as a teenager or adult and places I haven’t been in over 30 years.  Mammoth Cave National Park is one of those places I haven’t been in over 30 years.  In fact, it might even be closer to 40 since I have been there (if we ever find all of our photo albums I should be able to place dates on our visits).  As a result, I have only the vaguest recollections. 

It was a cave.  That part is pretty obvious.  We went at least twice, because on our second trip, we did the same walk as on our first, and then my dad went off and did an adults-only tour without me and my mom (he told me later that he had seen some bats, which made me kind of jealous because at that point in my life, bats were something that happened to other people). 

All I really can concretely remember of the cave are two parts that are now politically incorrect.  One is an area called “Fat Man’s Misery.”  I’m pretty sure that only really stuck with me because I remember asking my parents what it had to do with Batman.  You see, I thought the tour guide had said, “Batman’s Misery.”  The other was “Lost John,” a mummified body in a glass case.  Lost John died in the cave over 2,000 years ago, and the combination of minerals in the cave mummified him. 

You can still go on the tour that we took.  It is now called the “Historic Tour,” though Lost John is no longer on display.  He has been interred in an area of the cave where they do not allow tourists.

(originally posted May 25, 2015)