September 22 - 25, 2024 - Lafe and Faith's Odyssey

Boats, Caves, and Honky-tonks

The next day, we got up with our hosts, Sheila and Geoff, and accompanied them to church. Faith and I have never been to a Pentecostal/Charismatic church before, and the day we were there featured a faith healer from Colorado. Suffice to say, we were out of our element and saw a lot of things that we had never encountered before. Although we disagree with some of what we heard, it was a good experience to have once in our lives. After church, we headed back to their house to pack up, grab the boat, then head down the road to Lake Cumberland for some afternoon watersports. We started off with a round of riding an inflatable banana that we managed to keep upright until we caught the wake wrong and were sent flying into the water. Next, Geoff demonstrated slalom skiing before Faith, Chassa (Faith’s 2nd cousin), and I took turns knee boarding. In great contrast to the wake surfing several days before, I knee boarded quite well and managed to get a little air jumping over the wake. Lastly, Sheila and Faith did some wake boarding before we called it a night and headed back to the boat ramp. We got the boat out just after dark and made our way back to Geoff and Sheila’s house for some pizza and conversation late into the night. We got another good night of cool sleep, safe from the humidity outside.

The next day, we got up, got ready, bid our hosts farewell, and started driving eastwards to Mammoth Cave National Park. I worked while we drove through the beautiful Kentucky forests, hills, and mountains that laid along our route. When we got to the visitor center, we made a quick lunch of honey and peanut butter sandwiches before booking a cave tour and poking around the gift shop and exhibits until the scheduled hour. We made our way outside to some buses that took us a few minutes down the road to one of the numerous cave entrances. This entrance looked like a top-secret bunker from some spy movie as it was just a metal door in a concrete doorway straight into the side of the hill. A few feet beyond the threshold made all the difference: we stood upon a narrow stairway that took us across 100-foot chasms and through narrow gaps deep into the cave. Thankfully, we would not have to ascend those stairs to exit the cave. The tour took us through some really neat areas in the cave and ended with some extremely cool stalactites, stalagmites, ribbons, shields, and various other cave formations. We ascended up and out of the cave and re-boarded the buses back to the visitor center. We didn’t have anything else planned for the day and didn’t want to do anything outside as a few sprinkles were turning into a drizzle in the evening sky. So, we grabbed our work tools and spent the next several hours in the lodge being productive. That night, we drove a short distance down the road to the ferry that had closed for the season and stopped in the empty parking lot. It was a great place to sleep, and the steady patter of rain on the roof gave us good white noise through the night.

The next morning was rather damp and cloudy still, so we got up pretty early and hit the road towards Nashville to see Ashley, one of Faith’s childhood friends. We were going to meet her after she got done with work, so we spent a few hours at a coffee shop working before doing a little exploring in downtown Nashville. We meandered up and down Broadway Street and the intersecting avenues peeking into the countless honky-tonks, boot stores, and hat shops. It was suddenly mid-afternoon, so we hit the road down to Murfreesboro to see Ashley as quick as we could… which wasn’t all that quickly. For whatever reason, that was the same time that everyone else decided to get on the highway, so we sat in traffic for a solid hour before we could get moving southeast at a decent clip. We made it to her house a little after we intended to but still in time for a lovely homemade dinner of salmon and salad. The rest of the evening was spent catching up over some excellent riesling before heading to bed. The next day we all had jobs to do, so we worked for a while at Ashley’s house before taking a quick break to see some local attractions, such as the world’s largest cedar bucket. That evening, we got some food from a local Mediterranean joint before spending the rest of the day into the night chatting until it was time for bed.