We're Not Allowed in Mammoth Cave, Anymore

Many years ago, my husband and I with visited Mammoth Cave, Kentucky with our youngest daughter and her young husband. We took a guided tour of the largest cave and enjoyed hearing of the many uses the caves have had. One was the mining of Saltpeter for the use in gunpowder during the War of 1812. The main cave is huge and has so many interest points that it should be on your list of places to visit before you die.

About ten years later, we had been house boating at Dale Hollow, Tennessee on the Kentucky border with several other couples and decided that we would like to visit the caves again and tour a different cave. We stayed in Bowling Green, Kentucky overnight in a motel where fifty or sixty little girls were competing in a beauty pageant. What a thrill! Little Miss West Bowditch covered in sequins , satin ruffles, a quarter inch of pancake makeup and false eyelashes. Who could do that to a six year old? The next morning we found a little country restaurant with a scrumptious breakfast buffet. Pork tenderloin, biscuits, ham and red-eye gravy and all the great down home, heart attack on a plate goodies known to man. We stuffed ourselves with a fairly normal amount of food containing a wildly inappropriate amount of saturated fat, then headed out to see the caves. We bought two tickets to the "Peaks and Domes Cave". In human people English, this is a straight up and down cave of Stalactites and Stalagmites with a circular stairway about eleven stories down. One hundred and twenty people started down the stairs while ogling the sub-carboniferous rock formations all around us. "Honey" and I were about numbers sixty and sixty-one and about half way down, he said, "Oh, oh! I think I'm in trouble. I need a bathroom!" The dude had his gall-bladder out when he was twenty-nine and always had trouble with the amount of fats in restaurant food. Wouldn't you think that we would know better than to trap ourselves in the middle of a single file line of people (young people, old people, mommies carrying babies) half way down in a cave. So, here he is doing Lamaze breathing and praying that they have a bathroom facility at the bottom of the stairway. At the bottom, I asked the State Park Guard where the bathroom was. She replied, " Back up the stairs when the other sixty people get down here or one half mile out of the cave, but he can't go either way until the other guard gets down here." When she finally arrived at the end of the line of people, "Honey" took off running up the approximately one hundred and twenty steps and landings. I began the walk up and the guard wanted to bring up the rear, but I insisted that she go up with him, because I would be considerably slower and he was not well. I didn't tell her that I had suffered a small heart attack earlier in the spring. When "Honey" got to the top of the stairs, the door to the outside was locked! The guard eventually arrived and unlocked the door and "Honey" bounded off into the woods, dropped trou and leaned against a tree. The State Park sent a car for us and drove us back to the office. I looked at the back of my darling husband and "Holy Bat Guano"--- there was a tick on the back of his pants.

That sort of thing happens, if you are not too persnickety about where you drop your drawers. He visited their facilities to check for ticks and other woodland things. So, now you know why we are not allowed back in Mammoth Caves.

Next, I'll tell you why we aren't allowed in Howard Johnson's either.