In Paducah, I stopped at the National Quilt Museum, which is a pretty neat place to spend a couple hours. Here, quilt making has been raised to an art form, and there are some really original and intricate examples housed there. All the colors was a bit of sensory overload for me, after all this time in the woods.
The next day, I bee-lined it for Mammoth Cave National Park, where I am as I write this. MC is a pretty neat park, but to get inside the cave, the only way is to pay for a tour. So I spent Thursday and Friday in the backcountry part of the park, which is beautiful in it's own right, if a bit soggy in places. One cool thing I'd never really seen before is a little two car ferry, which has been installed in two places instead of a bridge to cross the river.
I found out in this trip that deer have an alarm call - it sounds kind of like a cross between a dog bark and a bird call. I saw a deer bounding away from my campsite making this really odd sound. I'd heard it before and had no idea what it was, so I'm glad to be able to match it to it's source. There is something else out there in the woods that makes a sound that's kind of like a police siren, but imagine it coming out of a bird. 'Woot, woot, wooohhhooooo' It doesn't sound like an owl - it's more shrill. Really kind of disconcerting to hear that in the middle of the night, then all the dogs in a two miles radius going nuts over it. (Campsite was only 0.5 mile or so from the park boundary).Backpacking by myself with such short days is not really all that fun. A lot of time to self-entertain out there, and the nights at this point are over 12 hours long. Maybe it would not be so bad if my brain had more than one channel playing, and it wasn't all re-runs.
What about the cave? That deserved it's own post, which I'll do tomorrow, after my second tour...
4 comments:
lkjlj
... ahh yeah... lkjlj means "hey dude-- enjoying the blog" :). Man, I 've never run across such a small car ferry like in your post. Wild. Later, M
It's a little late but we finally caught up with you...We know you've been in the woods but the reason for the reruns is the writer's strike in LA??!!!
The deep forest pics were the ones we most enjoyed!
Alright...it's me, Mike... I'm the guy out there going 'Woot, woot, wooohhhooooo'.
Sorry about that. It's really..just...sort of a habit of mine.
Enjoy the cave! :)
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