Less Than a Week to Go

[Until the trip officially starts, the stuff I’m putting on the blog will just be the ramblings of someone who is very excited about going on a big adventure. Feel free to skip them.]

Yesterday, I put air into the mattresses to make sure they all still held air. They do. They’re also much larger than I remembered. I had imagined we could fit one double mattress and two singles in the tent we’re borrowing from my brother, Brian; but I had imagined wrong. In the immortal words of Chief Brody: “We’re gonna need a bigger tent.” Tents can be very expensive, but they can also be very cheap. It’s hard to decide whether to go for the more expensive, life-long-guaranteed, LL Bean tent that would fit us all, or the less expensive version from Wal-Mart that would fit my cheapness level. In planning the trip, I hadn’t figured in the cost of an expensive tent, but we’re heading out for a lot of camping, and a lot of putting up and taking down of the tent, which might cause rippage of a cheap tent. My brain wrestled with these points all night, and early this morning I ordered the LL Bean tent.

I feel well-prepared for the trip, having printed out MapQuest directions for each stop (even though I have a great GPS) and researched the touristy things we’ll do. I am aware, however, that a map is only a partial indication of how long a drive is. There are construction, slow driver, and barricade obstacles that cannot be factored in but can greatly upset a plan. I learned this on one especially painful leg of our Kansas City journey.

Part of that trip was a visit to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. Mammoth Cave is the world’s longest known cave system, with more than 365 miles of it having been explored. It was named Mammoth Cave, not because any woolly mammoth were discovered there, but because the system is mammoth. It is also one of the oldest tourist attractions in the United States. Visitors have been enjoying its vastness since 1816. Adventurers can take tours that are less than one mile and take just over an hour, or are around four miles and take more than four hours. Some tours keep you upright and following simple trails. Others have you crawling between the floor and a ceiling that’s so low, if you’re too big, you can’t go. I planned a standing trail tour for my gang. I’m claustrophobic and knew I might have a hard enough time just being underground in the dark. Any tour that had me on my stomach crawling through a small hole in a rock would have to include alcohol, pills, and a pulley system.

Getting to Mammoth Cave nearly killed me. The highway system there sucks. Sorry, Kentucky, but it does. It’s not at all like West Virginia, which must have a much larger highway-sign budget. In West Virginia, you start seeing signs for an exit several miles before that exit. Each sign accurately details what can be found off that exit, why you might possibly want to take that exit, and just how far you have to go before you reach that exit. God help you in Kentucky. In fact, other than a posted speed limit, God is the only help you can hope for on the Kentucky highway, unless you consider, “Oh, hell, that was your exit you just passed,” helpful. When the Kentucky highway department bothers to label an exit, they do so right at the exit, without prior warning, so if you’re going the speed limit (which can be up to 70), you’re well past your exit by the time you know you should have taken it.

At one point, the two-lane highway we were on became divided by jersey barriers. We were in the left lane when the barriers started without warning, leaving us no choice but to pass our exit, which was on the right side of the barriers, drive the extra 16 miles to reach the end of the barriers and the next exit, turn around and drive back those extra 16 miles, exit the highway, re-enter it, and make sure we were on the right side of the barriers, so we could then take our exit. I was at the wheel and feeling some of my former road rage when this all went down, so Dottie went faster than she’s ever gone in her life, and we finished that detour in just about 20 minutes.

By the time we next stopped for gas, we thought it would be a good idea to buy a six pack of Corona. We don’t drink and drive, but we do drink after driving; driving long distances generally drives us to drinking. Kentucky was driving us there faster than usual. It turned out to be a really good idea. Mammoth Cave is in a dry county. They encourage the consumption of gravy for breakfast, but alcohol is bad for you.

We got to the general Mammoth Cave area well enough. We had a GPS with us, but it wasn’t one of the more modern, detailed kinds. It basically let you know if you were going in the right direction and how far away – as the crow flies – your destination is; it was cheap. So, with Jeff driving that final leg and me holding the GPS as well as Google Earth directions, we got off the highway. At first the GPS was in complete agreement with our moves. The Crow (our nickname for the GPS) indicated that we were getting closer: “We have 20 more miles, according to the Crow.” “The Crow says there are 15 more miles.” But then it said we were getting farther away. Then we’d get a little closer, but then farther away again. “No, the Crow says we’re going the wrong way!” Jeff was certain that this was a simple case of the winding of the road, so we kept going. The Crow said we were 12 miles from our destination. It had said that an hour earlier. Yet an hour later, it said we were 14 miles from our destination. The ride had gone from being a 12 hour ride with 12 miles to go, to a 14 hour ride with an unstable Crow and a rapidly destabilizing mom.

We zigged, we zagged, we weaved. We’d get closer. Then we’d get farther away. An hour and a half after being 12 miles away from our destination, we were still 12 miles away from our destination. We believed we were in or near a National Park, because we had not seen any sign of civilization since we’d gotten off the highway, but then again, this was Kentucky. Knowing we were in the wrong spot of the right place did not make matters any better. Thirteen and half hours in a car does something to people. I started thinking about the movie “Deliverance.” Maybe the hillbillies from that movie had once been New Yorkers just passing through, but then they couldn’t get out. Maybe that was going to be our fate. I wasn’t quite yelling “sooo-ee” yet, but I was feeling a little crazy.

When we finally found a little store and were able to stop for directions, they told us we were only a couple of miles away. That did nothing to appease me. We’d been a couple of miles away for hours now, I told them through a teary voice. They assured me we were almost there. We just had to cross a river on a car ferry, and we’d be there. I thought ferries were for the ocean, but I accepted the encouragement, and we went on.

We followed the directions and went deeper into the woods. In short time, we came upon a sign that said, “Road ends in water.” Road ends in water. That couldn’t be good. Why would a road end in water? How does a road that ends take you anywhere? I was crying now. I needed a drink.

But we kept going. And there it was. The ferry that would take us across the river. I don’t know whether this road had once NOT ended in water and had come to this fate as a result of a flood. I do not know whether there had once been a bridge at this spot. I do not know whether they just felt it was easier to ferry across the occasional loser who got so lost looking for Mammoth Cave National Park that they actually ended up where we were, than to build a bridge for said losers. All I know is, across that water that crossed that road was a sign that said “Mammoth Cave National Park.” We had arrived.

I’ve been mentally preparing myself for a drive like that on this trip. The biggest problem this time around is that Jeff won’t be there to calm me down with the occasional, “You really have to get control of yourself.” Pray for my children!