Road Trip 2010: Day 5

The winner of yesterday's caption was....

and here's what you'll be getting in the mail.  A Superman tin pencil box, 2 pencils made of sticks from Missouri and a bag of Kryptonite.  Be careful, it says it's more powerful than green M&M's.

Today we spent most of the day without cell phone service in the back woods of Kentucky - pretty much all I can say is "WOW!".  We started out in Cave City, Kentucky because we were planning to go here...

Considering we couldn't even take a purse or computer bag on the tour we definitely weren't going to be able to take Duke.  Luckily the US Government was thinking and actually offered kennels.  All we had to do was put down a $5 deposit on a lock and we were off; however, we got there and saw this...

Have you seen Duke?  He could totally fit through that.  Luckily again they had cat kennels; however two of them had hornets nests in them.  Look how sad he looks.  We found out later he wasn't all that lonely as everyone figured out he was there and kept wanting to go look at him cuz "he was so cute". 

This cave has the longest tunnel system in the world - all naturally formed.  We wanted to go on the tour to see the stalactites and stalagmites but it was cancelled due to all the water they have gotten in the area.  This particular cave is more known for their dry caves so I'm glad we still went on the tour.  I was in awe at the shear size of the cave.  At one point she turned off all the lights to show us how it really is in there - you literally couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

During the war of 1812 they did a lot of Salt-Petre mining in the cave.  These are old tools left over.

Beautiful waterfall that normally isn't there but due to all the rain they've had it appeared.

It was so cold in the cave you needed a jacket - it's a constant 54-56 degrees.  Upon exiting we got a little foggy...

We stopped at a couple of stores.  Have you ever been to a store that had SOOO much stuff you couldn't see anything?  That was this place.  Not sure who would buy a ham like that - didn't look sanitary to me.

Next we headed back north to do The Bourbon Trail.  We started out at Jim Beam.

Next was Heaven Hill.

Because of some closed roads (due to the flooding) we ending up on some back roads and came across this...

BTW - per Sean the camera puts on 10 lbs.

Then on to Maker's Mark - by far my favorite (so far) and the people were so nice and we even got there after they closed.

Each vat has 10,000 gallons of fermenting bourbon.  There were 6 in this room and they said there are 33 additional ones in another building.

Sean getting a taste (don't worry, they said it was ok).  Love the look on his face.

They let him have a taste of some one day old bourbon.  Their normal bourbon is 90 proof; this stuff was 130 proof.

Then we followed some very narrow, winding roads to Woodford Reserve.

As we tried to get to our next location, Wild Turkey, we passed many closed roads due to the flooding still and then finally came to this...

He made it through, as well as a police officer, so we decided to follow this truck.

Sean was so excited when we got to the other side; he wanted to do it again.  "This is why we have a Jeep".  But we weren't prepared for what we saw on the other side...

It wasn't all devastation though.  We also got to see the beautiful horse stables and the Kentucky bluegrass.

Yesterday didn't go quite the way we had planned (expected to no longer be in Kentucky) but it was a great day.  Today was going to be a light day so we'll be able to make up time.  I have to say though, our experience yesterday was the Kentucky people we came across were not the friendliest (except the guy at the hotel desk - he's actually staying at the hotel because his apartment is flooded - he was ever so helpful!).  I can't wait for today - I hope you can't either!