Day 10

We're in Kentucky by day 10 now and are spending the day at the Mammoth Cave National Park. What an amazing place and so very beautiful too. Again, it was just a mass of green, as far as the eye could see.

So, we get to the park and sign up for a cave tour. While we are waiting for our tour to begin, we decide to take a walk around the visitors center to kill some time. While walking around, I notice these huge webs in the trees. I can't believe how big they were and was getting a bit nervous about what kind and size of spider wove these webs. I was a woman on a mission and needed to know exactly what they were, so I flagged a ranger down and asked him. Luckily for me, as I didn't want to walk under any trees with these things in them, the "webs" are created by the tent caterpillar. They actually create them to lay their cocoons and in doing so, kill any part of the tree that they cover. If enough of the caterpillars get into a tree, they can kill the entire tree. I hated to think about the caterpillars killing the trees, but I was thankful it wasn't a huge spider. I just can't handle spiders....yuk!

So by now, its time for our tour. We load up on three buses and head over to the opening of the cave. The opening is actually the drain of a large sink hole. Water drains down into the cave, through layers and layers of limestone and then eventually ends up in the Green River. So we walk down into the cave and eventually end up 250 feet below the surface. It was so awesome down there. It maintains a temperature of 54 degrees, which felt great after the humidity of the surface. The tour took about 2 hours and we had a really awesome tour guide. His name was Ranger Bobby Steenbergen. He's been working at Mammoth Cave National Park for years and really knew his stuff. He was able to relay the information to us in an engaging and entertaining way.

After the tour, we went back to the visitors center, via the bus (which Nate thought was the best part of the tour) and had lunch. We drove around the rest of the park after lunch and saw some very beautiful scenery, as well as 13 deer and one turkey. I got a really good picture of a butterfly fluttering around these pretty purple flowers. I just kept flashing pictures, hoping that one of them would turn out good and thankfully one did. Brady also caught a tiny little frog that was hopping around the picnic area of a section of the Green river. And finally, on our way back to the truck, I found this caterpillar crawling on a dead tree brank. I've never seen one like this before and at first I actually thought it was tiny feather fluttering in the breeze when it moved.

We got back to our camper at about 8:30 pm and I spent the rest of the night doing laundry. I hadn't done any for a few days and boy did it pile up fast.

So, that was our day at Mammoth Cave National Park. It was a fun and educational day for all of us. Tonight, we are at the Smokey Bear RV Park, between Pigeon Forge and Gatlinberg, Tennessee. We had dinner, the boys player and are now asleep. Monte's watching the news and doing a Suduko puzzle. We will be exploring the Smokey Mountain National Park tomorrow. We here there are some great places to hike right around our RV park too. So, we may be staying her for a few days, we are not sure yet. I'll update the blog again tomorrow evening, you all have a great night. God Bless! :)