Wednesday, June 19th, 2024
Liberty, KY → Mammoth Cave National Park
83.08 mi, 3698 ft elevation
It seems that gravel roads and reroutes have been a theme of our Kentucky experience. Today, that reroute came pretty early on. The route put us on a small dirt road next to a house. But unfortunately, that road was a dead end and actually just led us to someone’s backyard. A woman and her dog came out of the house. I can’t say who was more confused—her or us—but we knew from our previous experiences with Kentucky dogs to turn around. Our reroute unfortunately took us to a stretch of gravel road, which the more brave members of the team biked across while Varsha and I walked.
The rest of the ride was much smoother! So smooth, we deluded ourselves into thinking we did the first half of the day an hour faster than we did. Turns out, we just crossed the time zone boundary and made it to central time!
We stopped for lunch outside a church. I had a delicious everything bagel with hummus (pronounced “humuu”, “humou”, or “humoo”—the team disagrees on the spelling), tofurky, tofu, and tomato. It’s an elite combination that I can’t recommend more. Also since the bagels we got were unsliced, JD cut his into a mobius strip.
Since we’ve started waking up and leaving earlier, we arrived at Mammoth Cave with time to do a tour! We did the Discovery Tour with our lovely tour guide Ranger Brendan. During the tour, we learned about the way the cave formed from rivers carving out and dissolving the limestone. Ranger Brendan explained how archaeologists have found evidence of Indigenous peoples using minerals from the cave thousands of years ago. And he pointed out the arch structure when we asked about the stability of the cave.
Some of my favorite parts of the trip have been all the opportunities to explore and learn about the areas we bike through. The opportunity to learn about Kentucky and its culture through activities like the Mammoth Cave tour and the Bourbon tour from a couple days ago have been really amazing. They give life to the state and help to break up the sometimes monotonous days of biking through farmland and mountains.
hi jess -kelton