The Way Back

It’s been a few weeks since our last posts from the Mississippi Delta. This struck us as an abrupt end so we decided to write one more post to complete the Tincantravels cycle for this season.

We continued up the Mississippi River to Memphis and then headed east to Kentucky for a visit to Mammoth Cave.Mammoth Cave is aptly named with its 365 miles of surveyed passageways and upwards of 600 miles of unexplored passages. Visitors have lots of options for cave tours. We chose “Domes and Dripstones”. These tours are not intimate affairs, we did the tour with about 80 people. We entered the cave through a man made entrance and vertically descended 280 stairs to a passageway for a 3/4 mile hike underground.

The Park Service uses red lights to illuminate the way.

Not all of the cave is decorated with stalactites and stalagmites. Most of the tour traveled through large dry domed chambers.

The Park has a nice selection of hiking trails to explore.

The reason for portions of the cave being dry is due to a large sandstone cap on the surface which prevents water reaching the limestone caves. Spring was in full force in the Park.

We also saw a hatchling Ring Neck Black Snake, at about 3 inches, it is the smallest snake we’ve seen. Traveling the back roads of Kentucky you never know what you’ll see. From Kentucky we headed to central Ohio to drop the Tin Can at the Airstream Factory for some end of travels maintenance. From Ohio we headed west to Chicago for a week of fun and games with our granddaughter Rebekah.

It was a fun if exhausting week. Rest assured that while this is the last post for a while, we are already planning our trip back to the southwest next autumn — so look for new adventures in a couple of months.