Mammoth Caves!!

Thanks to the Memorial Day, we had a long weekend, which we certainly used very well. Chris, his two friends “Brian” from Motorola and I, drove the whole way to Kentucky to Mammoth Cave National Park

Friday May 26
We hit the road at midday, in our rented SUV, which wasn’t as big as we thought and we almost didn’t fit in it.
There was only 1 requirement in order to go underground in the cave and that was to bring High-top, over-the-ankle lace-up boots, for your safe tines in the cave. But 20 minutes before arriving to the campsite, at 9:30pm Chris said: “I forgot my boots!!”. Our tour was at 9 am next morning… but we were in America!!! So even in Kentucky, and in a county that was in the middle of nowhere, we just drove to a super Wal-Mart, open 24 hours, 9 miles away and got hiking boots for 11 dollars at midnight. Isn’t that great??
Back in the campsite, I discovered that Americans camping style was a bit different from Colombians, or at least from what I was use to. Everybody was sleeping already, there was no noise at all, nobody was playing the guitar, the fires were already extinguish, no drunk people… anyway; we had a couple of whiskeys and went to bed.

Saturday 27
I woke up early and absolutely sick, after throwing up all the food that was in my stomach for the last days, I went back to bed and at 8:45, feeling like shit and very weak, we went to meet our group to take the wild cave tour, which is by far the toughest adventure I’ve ever had. Plus I was very weak, so that didn’t help. We were underground for 6 and half hours, crawling and climbing most of the time. It was a lot of fun, but it is definitely a one-time experience.
This is how we looked when we came out.

At night we got together with Sarah and her husband Nathan, who are Brian Jone’s friends and we had a great time and excellent American style camping food (hotdogs, hamburgers, apple pies and the most delicious smores which are grilled marshmallows, with a piece of chocolate in between two graham cookies.

Sunday 28
We took the violet lantern tour, which was a beautiful tour with old stile lanterns, which showed us how were the things in the caves many years ago.



In the afternoon we took our last tour called frozen Niagara, which was in my opinion the most beautiful one.

After all this caving we went from bottom to top! On the alpine slide, probably the highlight of my trip!! God!! That was so much FUN!!

Monday 29
We packed all our stuff and after a great breakfast we headed to Sarah’s and Nathan’s house to say bye and that gave me a better understanding of the south style living. They are more relax people, with a harder to understand, but very nice accent and that morning I got introduced to the bluegrass music, which is some sort of country and very nice music.

After wise, and thanks to Nathan’s advice we went to makers mark distillery, which is the currently the oldest operating bourbon distillery in the nation. They gave us a tour that showed us all the process and at the end we could buy and dip our own bottle in the wax.


So now I have a personalize maker mark bottle. I am not a very big bourbon fun, but it was very interesting to know that makers mark distillery sells their barrels to Laphroaig, which is, as a matter of fact my favorite brand of whiskey.
We arrived to Chicago around 10:00pm. It was a great trip, full of adventures and lots of fun!!
Click here to see more pics!!