Three days, twenty-three counties, six hundred and sixty commas, five miles, two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, seven boxes of Vienna sausages, a tractor mailbox and 30 general stores
After six months of news about the new coronavirus … after about 130 days of partial confinement … after 3 or 4 months of being masked in public, we had to escape the city.
We went out on the road on a Friday with a healthy, conscientious couple in a taste that we believe Governor Beshear would approve: we wouldn’t leave the state and we would usually stay out, away from the others.
A waterfall in southern and southeastern Kentucky that recently stood out in OnlyInYourState.com seemed to fit perfectly into the road trip bill; This would take us to six waterfalls in the foothills of eastern Kentucky, through wooded trails.
Our companions — I’ll refer to them as Brad and Janet — were perfect choices. We had known them for many years and had traveled with them often. When we’re together, there’s always fun and laughter.
It’s a story of what can happen badly, well, on a road in those days, well planned conscientiously but also spontaneously.
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Brad advised us to take his newly acquired Chevy 57, however, I hesitated thousands of miles in a 90-degree climate with no air conditioning. (Call me pampered)
In the end, Brad recognized the point and picked us up in his four-door, air-conditioned van. We’d be sweating, but for the trip.
We were a little on the road, the guys in the front, the women in the back, while Donna handed out home triptiks with maps and detailed instructions. Then he passed his big surprise: his traditional Kentucky Road Trip bingo card.
The 40 squares included simple unearments (mobile tower, road product stand, soybean box) but also included perspectives on Donna’s playful imagination. We had to locate a pond with cows, a Kentucky-shaped cloud, and two types of Dollar General stores: one in a city and one “in the middle of nowhere” (which, we would see, is not so hard to find). locate).
Donna wondered if her associates would find the stupid Road Trip bingo. She didn’t want to worry. Brad and Janet were delivered instantly. And Janet made the decision that it wouldn’t be a boys-by-girls competition, she proved she had a good eye for adjustment and temporarily punished Brad and me, saying she was “dressing” us.
As he had threatened to do so, Brad brought some boxes of Vienna sausages to the grill, opening one about Janet’s protests over the smell and ate each sausage with joy, poking them with a plastic fork. He is generous, however, he did not offer himself to percentage of singles, his way of insisting that it was a valuable delicacy not worthy for our lips.
Road Trip Bingo thankfully helped us spend the hours needed to succeed at our first destination: Seventy-six Falls in Clinton County, which is located on the Tennessee state border. The falls are known locally, especially among sailors, as they are located on the edge of a stream on Lake Cumberland. It turns out that Seventy Six Falls can only be admired through the water, and there were many other people who admired it from the various pontoons, ski boats, barges or floating in the water. (Were they socially distant? Not so much). But we can only see the falls of the earth.
That wouldn’t be our only setback. Our time is avoided being Princess Falls, located in McCreary County in the vast recreation area of National River and Big South Fork. We had a hard time locating him; we discovered many brown tourist symptoms indicating recreational sites, but none for Princess Falls. As a definitive ditch, we stumbled across Yamacraw’s daylight hours usage area, discovered a rare parking area, and consulted a framed map of the National Park Service; In the look nailed, as after the fact, a small piece of diamond-shaped sheet steel that bore the words “Princess Falls” and an arrow.
OnlyInYourState.com is a smart website, but its description of the trail leading to the falls – “a simple and child-friendly walk” – was exaggerated. In truth, it is a circular of approximately 8 kilometers dotted with irregular rocks and tree roots in a position for the non-observer.
We weren’t far away when I learned that a time when laser surgery on my right eye, performed only 24 hours earlier, was distorting the vision of my untreated left eye. The track was blurry; I had to turn around. Brad and Janet continued their walk, and when they arrived here more than an hour later, they said they had wisely selected. Still, it meant that the six-stunt project would not end.
I said we’d only be at the foot of the hills on this trip, but I was wrong. McCreary County is mountainous, at least by Kentucky standards, and we have rarely noticed a direct stretch of road. McCreary County is also impoverished. It is the only county in the United States where most families earn less than $20,000 a year and is the poorest county in the country. As we walked down Highway 92 on a bend, we passed countless abandoned houses on the roads, department stores and the former Rocky Branch School in neighboring Wayne County.
As recently as 2008, a photographer captured some of the old and good views of the construction of the sandstone school built through the Works Progress Administration and which operated from 1938 to 1995; Today, holes have been opened in the ceiling, the windows are disappearing and the plants are invading the construction. I’m sure your former academics and teachers are hurting that view.
Because we would approach Corbin, where Colonel Harland Sanders developed what became Kentucky Fried Chicken, we sought to make a stop at the Sanders’ Café Museum in North Corbin and order what would be my first KFC bird cube. Unfortunately, we arrived to locate the place to eat in a state of reconstruction; The closest we were given to the museum was the service window, where we ordered the $30 filling to take it back to our hotel.
The next morning, we went to Cumberland Falls State Park, the largest waterfall through the volume east of the Mississippi and south of Niagara, where we discovered beautiful perspectives as we socially walked away from other tourists, adding Amish. But the Eagle Falls parking lot is full. Between this and my view of hiking being questioned, we leave the cascade loop and improvise.
Soon after, Brad parked on a gravel road marked Hughes Cemetery to turn around in an unsuccessful search for a specific pottery shop. The pavement disappeared into the woods, and may not resist exploring it. We crossed the forest for a mile or more before reaching a clearing where the cemetery was located, which included tombstones for others born in the 19th century and several small baby stones, some unnamed. It was remote and a little scary; Donna, usually intrigued by the old cemeteries, hovered outside the door. Just then, a branch fell from a tree and crashed noisily into the ground. We take this as a sign of withdrawal cautiously.
More promising was a sign in McCreary County indicating the scenic dominance of the herb ark (the Kentucky Geological Survey said our state is believed to have more herb arches than any other eastern state). We put the $3 scale to the payment in a box of keys on the unmanned front and discovered ourselves temporarily hunting through a wooded valley to an herb-based bridge stretching about a hundred payments wide. It was a lovely place to enjoy a cheese lunch and crackers. But we deserve to have gone through what we learned later, it is a paved path to see up close the sandstone arch.
I have taken note of the ordinary advertising expansion that has taken place in the 27 occupied United States of Somerset. Today, the road is home to dozens of restaurants, from Mellow Mushroom to Wasabi Express and to the old suspects themselves.
A few miles north, we strayed to Route 150, avoiding at Stanford (“Kentucky’s oldest city of the moment”) ordering fried green tomatoes and some peach tartlets at the Bluebird Café. We admired the pots and hanging baskets that overflowed with flowers along Main Street. But we were saddened to be informed that the local mayor who cared for the flowers had died in a twist of fate while cutting off the city’s assets the week before. Mayor Scottie Ernst is obviously a big-hearted man, who organizes hand games in downtown Stanford, drives the Easter bunny and dresses up like Uncle Sam by The Fourth of July. R.I.P., Mayor.
Continue to Danville, where a city water tower painted to proclaim “the city of the first.”
“What are the first?” Janet asked skeptically. Well, it’s Kentucky’s first capital; As long as the first governor of the state; It housed the first university, the law school and the job west of Alleghenies and the first courthouse of the state, among other distinctions.
Oh, and on Christmas morning 1809, Danville’s own Dr. Ephraim McDowell performed the first successful removal of an ovarian tumor without access to anesthesia. The brave patient lived another 32 years. A statue in mcDowell’s honor is now on the U.S. Capitol, and in 1959 its symbol attached to an American postage stamp; 3 hospitals are named after him.
We walked through Constitution Square, from a series of constitutional conventions that led Kentucky to separate from Virginia, and its wooden huts that are reproductions of historic buildings. In Governors’ Circle, we discovered the plates of the four governors of Henderson.
We continue through a mountainous field, looking to locate elusive pieces on Donna’s bingo card (a stone fence, a vane) and imagine pieces for a new Kentucky Bingo game (such as an obsolete witch hat water tower, a six-foot domestic antenna parabolic and a pontoon ship).
Outside Bardstown, we spied our 20th Dollar General store, which had been specially designed to resemble a rickhouse for aging barrels of bourbon, for which the town is famous. Brad stopped and bought five more cans of Vienna sausage, including hot & spicy and jalapeño, that he jealously guarded.
The hotels we stayed in offer loose breakfast buffets, but you know when it is. At our Hampton Inn in Corbin, we were given heavy bags with cereal bars, an apple, a blueberry bun and other treats; at Hampton in Bardstown, we were able to choose pieces from a menu the day before; Breakfast was delivered the next morning to our room.
Before lunch before lunch, we went to Heaven Hill Distillery to see if a guest center renovation we had noticed in the past had been completed. Instead we discovered that a primary expansion is underway and will come with a reproduction of the company’s rural space in 1935 that was destroyed in a notorious 1996 hell that also incinerated seven rick spaces and 90,000 barrels of whiskey; 2% of the world’s bourbon source was lost in the fire.
An even greater wonder of other people’s line outside the front door. The guest center is not scheduled to open for another 90 minutes. It turns out that other people waited in the July heat to be admitted, one or two at a time, to buy a rare bottle of 16-year Old Fitzgerald in a small reserve launched that day. Price: $230, restriction of a bottle consistent with the customer. They sold around noon.
After lunch, we paid a few dollars to walk around the grounds of Federal Hill, Stephen Foster’s pre-war mansion “My Old Kentucky Home,” until the rain drove us away. Foster also wrote American classics such as “Oh! Susanna,” Camptown Races, “Swanee River”, “Jeanie with soft brown hair”, “Beautiful Dreamer” and much more; He is said to have been the first fully professional composer in the United States However, the deficient Satan drank in misery, living almost without money in a flophe space in Bowery, New York, succumbing to a mysterious death at the age of 37.
To avoid storms, we headed to the United States 62 outdoors in Elizabethtown and then to the county where Donna grew up. We look for the space where he was born (left) and we point to the old High School in Caneyville from which he graduated and the space where he spent his teenage years.
A few miles later, Brad screamed. There, in the look of the road, was a tractor-shaped mailbox, painted john Deere green. He had harpooned the white whale that had eluded him for three days and nearly six hundred miles. Twenty miles later, despite everything, we saw a donkey.
Unfortunately, some of the bingo carton boxes have remained uncovered; we have no symptoms of errors, no bird trucks, no egg symptoms for sale.
For these, we’ll have to wait some other way some other day.
Guest columnist Chuck Stinnett can be contacted to [email protected].