Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Trail to Nowhere :(


Trail to Nowhere :(

Sunday 9/7/14  Nolin Lake state Park. KY

 

On our travels to our current location we went from Eastern Standard Time to now Central Time Zone.  This time change is fine except I got all confused this morning when I was ½ awake and thought it was 7:30am.  So I got up, dressed, brushed teeth, and so on before I realized it was 6:30am!!! Geesh!  Oh well, I was up so I started writing the remainder of Fridays journal entry and then Saturdays.  Being we have no cell service thus no internet I have to write the journal in Microsoft Word and then transfer it to the Journal when we drive somewhere with cell signal.  Jami was up at 8:30am and cooked a great breakfast of sausage & scrambled eggs with toast.  Once we finished eating we were off to go hiking by 10am.  Jami found what looked to be a nice trail to a water fall in Mammoth Cave National Park, so we drove the 20 minutes to the trail head.  Once there we took a quick drive down a narrow gravel road to an old church that was established in 1842 with a cemetery behind it.  A lot of the tomb stones that were readable had dates of people that passed away in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. 
 
 
 


 

After that side trip we were off hiking to a waterfall.  We had a map so we knew exactly which trails to take to get there.  Being we’re not on speaking terms with the GPS at the moment we went “old school” and used a map J   ((Thought), I wonder if today’s younger generation even know how to read a map?)  1st trail which we estimated was about 1 mile was “Buffalo Trail” which was a very wide trail that looked like park service personnel drive vehicles down when needed. 

 
 Once we reached our turn at the 2nd trail “Turnhole Bend Trail” we hung a right off the wide trail to a narrower and much more scenic trail that we figured was about ¾ of a mile to our next turn onto “Spring Loop Trail”. 

 
We reached “Spring Loop Trail” and turned left per the map and continued on.  It looked to be about another ¼ mile hike to the falls.  Well, the “Falls” were nowhere to be found.  We planned to hike 2 miles to the Falls then 2 mile back.  We ended up hiking 3.5 miles to just turn around and hike back.  Yep, our planned 4 mile hike turned into 7.  That was a bummer.  But not all was lost, we did get to see the rear of a deer as it was hopping away from us. J Geesh! 
 If you don’t already know, we almost always have Jemma (our dog) with us and today was no different.  Jemma, who is a French Bulldog actually made the 7 mile hike!!  She’ll sleep good tonight.  Once back to our truck we decided to drive over to the Mammoth Caves Visitor center to see what the cave tour schedules are and to purchase tickets for tomorrow’s tour.  The shortest way there involves a very small ferry crossing.  The ferry can carry at best 3 small vehicles, and of course on our first ride across it was a full boat, 3 cars J 
 
 


 

Once at the visitor center we spoke with a park ranger who recommended we take the “Historic” tour.  So we got in line and purchased our tickets for that tour which starts at 10am and ends at 12 so we also purchased tickets for a 2nd tour “Frozen Niagara” that starts at 1pm and ends at 2:30pm.  This should be so much fun!!  We headed back home which included the ferry crossing and stopping to get gas.  Being we had cell service at the gas station we hung out there for a bit to upload yesterday’s journal entry.  Once we got home Jami made us some delicious spaghetti with sausage in the sauce for dinner.  Yum Yum!  

We got showers and sat out by a nice camp fire.  OH!!  I must thank Ken (Jami’s step-father) for giving us a truck load of wood.  We love having camp fires, but I’m to cheep to buy wood J  So THANK YOU KEN!!
 
 
 Yep, That's Jemma in the chair resting from todays long hike :)

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