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Several police cruising around and I noticed a sign that suggested this would not be a good place for Jane and Joanne to camp.
South on Hwy 259 then east on 70 from Brownsville, saw the first tobacco drying sheds
to Mammoth Cave State park. Big set up, including a campground and store, but not that busy, even for a Saturday morning. Mammoth cave is, well, mammoth, with over 350 miles of passageways mapped and likely more to be found. As long as I was there, I decided to take a tour. Disinfected my shoes to prevent spread of white nose disease to bats and joined a group of 80, including the obligatory girl scout troop and crying baby, on buses to the "new" entrance where in the 1920's a guy, on a hunch, blasted a 30 foot deep hole in a sinkhole. He found a deep, narrow shaft so of course he tied on a rope and dropped 250 feet into the ground - and found a series of horizontal rooms that connected to the Mammoth cave system. In a few years, it was all the thing to put on Sunday best and climb down wet, rickety stairs by lamplight and tour the caves.
We climbed down sturdy steel stairs with handrails, but it was still enough for me and I was glad to get to the bottom and the big rooms. Much of it was dry and rough from all the rockfall after the rivers dropped to lower levels. (They are still there: an early six hour tour involved fording a subterranean river.) Not us, we stopped a couple of times for a little ranger talk and humor, eventually came into a wet area with stalagmites, stalactites, cave bacon and sheet flow, one maybe 40 feet high ("dry Niagara" of course) that we climbed down and behind. Out another entrance and enough of caves for me.
The best part were the beautiful, tall tulip poplar and American beech just outside the entrance. The nation park includes a lot of acres, with many hiking trails and a lot of wildlife. I saw deer, turkeys and as coyote, would be a good place to spend time above ground.
Skipping the gift shop, worried I was running late for the bourbon tours, I motored up I65 30 miles, then east on Hwy 31E where I got turned around in Hogdenville, birthplace of Abe Lincoln and inadvertantly went by his boyhood home. When I finally rolled into Bardstown, it was 4:30, I had missed the tours (lost and hour to eastern time that jogs randomly through eastern Kentucky) but the town was jammed with cars and people because - it was the last day of the annual bourbon festival! Well now. I parked, walked the couple blocks of main street
then over to the festival grounds. From the entrance, among the tents I could see booth for a number of distillers - Makers Mark, Jim Bean, Heaven Hills, etc - and I figured I was going to have a couple of hours of bourbon tasting. no such luck. Although the micro tobacco guys were doing a fine business and selling cigars, the bourbon folks were selling only tshirts and knicknacks. However , in the back was a beer and bourbon garden, most folks drinking Bud from blue aluminum cans and decent bourbon mixed with gingerale and I think sweet tea. Only a few choices, I had a new release from Makers Mark, MM 46 I think, on the rocks, which caused a stir. I sipped in a crowd of honest to god Kentuckians and a cloud of smoke - a lot of smoking along the way more the farther east I go and here everyone was smoking - and pondered why I hadn't packed evening wear for the $140 a head black tie bourbon tasting and ball later in the evening.
I looked at the cars, including a sweet Karmann Ghia
toured a few booths, had nice talk with a friendly man and - I must have been lightheaded - bought a "make your own bourbon" kit, a pint mason jar of charred oak chips to which you add your own "white dog", the clean, wicked strong alcohol that comes from the still before it is put into barrels for aging. He said I could get white dog in any liquor store in Kentucky. Sure, what was I thinking.
Enough of that and disappointed I didn't get a distillery tour, something I was looking forward to. Sometime things just don't work out. I got mixed up trying to find Stephen Foster park, was way past where it should have been and decided to just keep going north the 30 miles toward Louisville. Along the way I passed a huge factory - which turned out to be a Jim Beam distillery!
After a lot of wandering around on and off busy freeways in the dusk, at dark I finally found a decent hotel in a sketchy part of town and called it good. Wasn't as nice as the parks have been, but sometimes things just don't work out.