Being retired is great. No getting around it. I am rich beyond imagination by the definition that true wealth is control over your own time.
After our little jaunt to Gatlinburg (we didn’t check into the house until the third night after we left Florida) we meandered our way up to Wisconsin to see my mom, who lives on the shores of Lake Michigan where I grew up. And when I say meandered, I mean it. We spent 2 nights in hotels between Gatlinburg and my mom’s house. It’s so luxurious to only drive 4-5 hours a day. We’ve spent our life before retirement rushing from place to place because our time belonged to someone else. Before retirement we often needed a month’s rest from our vacation because of everything we, by necessity, tried to cram into the two weeks a year we had complete control over. From experience I know that’s not a great way to live.
On this trip we realized that Mammoth Caves was kind of, sort of, on our route from one place to another. We decided to take this opportunity to stop and see it, something we’d talked about several times in the past, but couldn’t make work for one reason or another.
A day or two before the Gatlinburg week ended, as I looked at the Mammoth Caves National Park web site, I realized I made a big mistake. Apparently I missed the advice that visitors make tour reservations far in advance as tours sell out quickly. When I finally got around to looking at how to take a cave tour, sure enough, they were all sold out on the Park’s website for the day we planned to be there. I was bummed to say the least.
We decided to go to the Park anyway and do whatever we could just to say we’d been there.
When we arrived, we were happily surprised to learn that it was National Public Lands Day. Not that we care that much about Public Lands, but the Park Service takes that day so seriously that all Self-Guided Tours of Mammoth Cave (for which a visitor does NOT need a reservation, and which are not regularly scheduled after Labor Day each year) are FREE. We walked into a situation that made my mistake a very fortuitous one.
There was nothing mentioned on the internet about either National Public Lands Day or free self-guided tours, but word must have gotten out to a lot of people because there were A LOT of people there that day. And then, because there were a lot of people there that day, they must have added other tours because we were also able to walk up and buy tickets for a 2-hour Historical Tour of the Cave.
First though, we went down to the self-guided tour. Thank goodness I’ve recently lost some weight and have been working out by running in the pool. It made the physical effort required by the tour easier. I could have done it before, but hardly. I only huffed and puffed a fraction of what I would have 6 months ago.
Let me tell you, when they named it Mammoth Cave, they weren’t kidding. To date, as far as they know, the total length of Mammoth Cave is 426 miles. That makes it the world’s longest known cave system. The name, Mammoth, comes not from its size, but from the ancient creatures that used to roam the area. Remains of woolly mammoths have been found in the cave system. How convenient that “mammoth” in this case is a double entendre.
The National Park where the cave is located, dedicated in 1941, comprises nearly 53,000 acres about 80 miles south of Louisville, Kentucky. It’s visited by 2 million people a year, 500,000 of which take cave tours. The Park became a World Heritage Site in 1981, and an International Biosphere Reserve in 1990, whatever that means. After exiting the cave, we did have to walk on a biohazard mat to disinfect our shoes to help prevent the spread of white snout disease, something to do with bats. We didn’t encounter any bats on our tour, but better safe than sorry.
You know I’m fascinated by history, far more now than when I was learning it in school. The facts and history surrounding Mammoth Cave is spectacularly interesting. Far more than I can mention in a 5-minute blog post. But if you are interested in exploring some of it yourself, this website, linked here, is a good place to start.
Not that Mammoth Cave was on our bucket list, but I’m glad we got to see it. The geography of this country is diverse and remarkable. And its beauty, so different in endless ways, brought me up short several times. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Contemplating that, I realized that beauty is more than something physically pleasing to look at with human eyes. There is beauty in form, in function, in design, in honor, in spirit, or in worth. That contemplation prompted me to look for beauty in places that don’t require eyes to see. It’s a good reminder for how to spend retirement wealth, while keeping your money in the bank.
P.S. The autumn colors had not really started to turn yet in Kentucky, but as we drove north after finishing our visit to the cave, by the time we reached Wisconsin, there were significant spots of red, yellow, and orange already starting in the trees. Randy and I talked about going back to Florida by way of New England. We’ve never been to that part of the country, and the timing is perfect to see the fall colors that are renowned to be stunning. New England is definitely not on the way back to Florida, so we haven’t yet made a decision about that. We’ll certainly let you know.
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