Oct 20, 2021 Mammoth Cave National Park
On Monday October 4 we moved to Santa Fe NM. Tuesday found us visiting two different art exhibits. First was Meow Wolf : the House of Eternal Return.
I had heard it was really interesting and something to see. I don’t know, maybe we are too old, but we didn’t “get it” and thought it was pretty weird but we spent 2 hours wondering around the place and some of the rooms were pretty neat.
The next day, we went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. They had it worked out so you could use your phone and ear buds to learn much about Georgia O’Keeffe and her artwork. We loved it! We wished that the museum was twice as large!
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On Wednesday we left Santa Fe and got on I-40 heading east crossing into Texas and in Amarillo and went south to Palo Duro Canyon State Park. This park holds a beautiful canyon nicknamed the Grand Canyon of Texas
and appears in the middle of a flat plain with the reds, oranges and browns of the canyon walls are stunning. Our campsite was at the bottom of the canyon, after following a steep, winding road down we set up camp.
Mark was thrilled to see a tarantula
crossing our campground road.
We took several short hikes in the mornings because it was unseasonably hot while we were there - getting up to the high 90’s each day.
The second day, we drove into the nearby town of Canyon and went to the air conditioned Panhandle and Plains Historical Museum in the afternoon. It was impressive for such a small town and we spent over 2 hours there.
My favorite exhibits were of paleontology, geology, windmills, Western art and a typical Texas pioneer town. There was also a good exhibit about the oil industry in Texas.
On October 9 we left Palo Duro Canyon and continued east to Oklahoma City. We had one full day there and made good use of it. We started out by going to the very nice Myriad Botanical Gardens in downtown Oklahoma City.
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Oklahoma City
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We ate brunch at the Red Rooster which was recommended by some folks we met in Santa Fe that their kids own and run the restaurant which was very nice. After lunch, we visited the Oklahoma State Capitol - a very beautiful building.
Next we drove to the Bricktown section of town and took a water taxi ride on the manmade canal. It was a fun ride and the huge bronze Centennial Land Run Monument was especially nice. It depicts participants in the 1889 opening of the unassigned lands in Oklahoma.
We also drove past the grounds of the Oklahoma City National Memorial And Museum. That night we had some excitement - we had a big thunderstorm and were even under a tornado warnings.
The next day, we continued east on I-40 and crossed into Arkansas. We spent 3 nights at Devils Den SP between Fort Smith and Fayetteville Arkansas. It was a very beautiful rugged park and we took a really nice trail called the Devils Den Trail. The CCC built the trail and used huge stones as steps and stepping stones.
There were lots of neat caves, ravines and overhangs. That night we went to a campfire program that talked about how the CCC worked and lived at Devils Den. Also, while we were here we went to the very nice Botanical Gardens of the Ozarks in Fayetteville.
Another rainy day we drove up to Bentonville, Ark. Our first stop here was the Walmart Museum.
Sam Walton founded Walmart in Bentonville and the museum told about Sam Walton, his family and the history of Walmart. Our main reason for going to Bentonvillle was to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art which was highly recommended by my mom and sister. It is a very nice art museum in a very beautiful settings with many acres of gardens and woods to walk through also. It was rather unfortunate that it rained most of the day. We toured the museum and the gardens (in the rain)
and also toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman Wilson House which was moved from New Jersey and put back together on the museums grounds. It is a Usonian house -which is simpler and lower cost than his custom houses, but still showed Wright’s designs and furnishings.
In the evening, we went to North Forest Lights, an immersive nighttime light show in the woods with five distinct instillations. It was nothing like Christmas light shows that I have seen, but more of a celebration of the life of the forest that made it very neat and unique.
The next day we moved to Lake Ouachita State Park which is near Hot Springs Arkansas. It is a beautiful lake, the largest in Arkansas and we camped here a couple of times in the early 80’s.
The next day we went into Hot Springs and visited Hot Springs National Park. In its hey day, it was the hot springs /spa place to go. The opulent bath houses still stand but only one is still open for “the bath” . The national park has one bathhouse, the Fordyce,
opened and preserved as it was in the 1920’s - very interesting. We walked down bathhouse row and along the promenade behind it and took some drives on the mountain roads around the park. It is a very interesting and unusual park. That afternoon, we were signed up to take a pontoon boat tour on Lake Ouachita, but because of a severe thunderstorm watch it was canceled . That was a good thing too, because the storm came through about what would have been half way through our tour.
The next day was beautiful, and we went to Garvan Woodland Gardens.
They were spectacular! Even though much of it was a woodland setting, it was meticulously groomed. The Children’s Garden was one of my favorite parts with narrow paths to follow and rocks to climb but the neatest part was the treehouse!
They certainly didn’t have places like this when I was a kid. There was also a beautiful glass and wood chapel.
We couldn’t go inside because there were 4 weddings planned for the day. When we got back to the campground, Mark sailed his remote controlled sailboat. It was such a nice day.
We left Lake Ouachita and continued east and north. We crossed into Missouri for a little while and then crossed the Mississippi River into Tennessee. I guess that officially puts us in the Eastern half of the country. We spent two nights at Reelfoot Lake SP in extreme Northwest Tennessee.
Reelfoot Lake was formed by earthquakes along the New Madrid Fault in 1811 and 1812. The land where the lake is now was a cypress forest and sunk several feet and the Mississippi River filled it in. It is still really cool looking with lots of cypress trees along the banks. We took an auto tour around the lake and later Mark got the kayak out and did some exploring. We were lucky to be there when the white pelicans are migrating through and we saw many, many of them.
Our next destination was Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky where we are now. Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world with 420 miles of mapped passages.
We took 2 different cave tours today. In the morning we took the Historical tour which entered the cave through the only natural opening walking along
2 miles of paths and climbed 580 steps. Sometimes we had to duck or squeeze to get through tight passages. We saw evidence of saltpeter mining from the war of 1812. The paths just seem to go on forever and we saw such a small part of them. In the afternoon we took the Domes and Dripstones tour. We had to take a bus to the start of this tour which was manmade in 1921 when the then property owner discovered a sinkhole on his property connected to the cave system. Of course, he did not have the 280 steps straight down that enabled us to get to the cave. They did it with ropes and lantern light. Most of Mammoth Cave is what is called a dry cave, but toward the end of this tour there was a portion of wet cave called Frozen Niagara and we saw stalactites and stalagmites and flowstone. It was quite amazing and a very interesting day.
More coming later …
