Mammoth Cave National Park

Our family spent the Labor Day Holiday camping at the Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. If you know us, you will realize these types of trips are not the norm since the only one that truly enjoys them is Joel. However, we all managed to have a good time even while enduring 99-degree weather.

We ate most meals at the campsite and Kaitlin’s highlight was to help her dad get the cooking fire going. She entertained herself for a while moving the wood around to make sure the fire was just right. Both girls kept us going the whole time. They could not sit still for more than five minutes. Kaitlin specially kept complaining of being bored. We played games at the campsite and went on short hikes trying to keep them entertained.

We took the Frozen Niagara Cave tour on Sunday morning. The park offers several options for Cave Tours, but this was the only one I could handle, being claustrophobic and all that. The tour was a little over an hour long but very nice; the temperature inside the cave I believe is around 55 degrees. Apparently, this is the only part of the cave system that has this type of formations due to water leaking in; the rest they say is very dry.

After the cave tour we took the girls to the Kentucky Action Park in Cave City where they have different activities such as bumper boats and cars, go karts, horseback riding, mini-golf, etc. They also have a mega Alpine slide. To ride the slide, you ride up the hill on a chair lift. Natalie wasn’t tall enough to ride, and I was more than happy to stay back with her riding other things while Joel and Kaitlin rode the slide a couple of times. However, Kaitlin did not let me off the hook and I ended up having to face my fears and go up in the chair lift and ride down with her one time. I have to admit it was not nearly as scary as I had imagine it.

We took Fuzzy the Bear, Natalie’s kindergarten class mascot, with us on this trip, and Natalie took it very seriously to make sure he was involved in all the activities we did.

The one time we forgot to take him, we got this face when she realized it.

It was a fun trip, not as relaxing as Joel and I would have liked it but at least the girls were exposed to a somewhat slower pace of life out in nature. This picture is completely posed. It is what Joel would have liked to do, but did not get to.

On the way back home, we stopped at The Cheesecake Factory for dinner. Totally blew our budget, but oh so worth it!