3rd Stop - Mammoth Cave (KY)

Blog Post #10 - Written May 16, 2025

3rd Stop - Mammoth Cave (KY)

When Megan was doing her research of all the cool things there are to do and see in these United States, she came up with a list of about 700 places to stop... Given that our plan is only 12-15 months and assuming we do 1 thing per day... you can do the math. She had to cut out a lot. It was a painful, iterative process haha. One thing she found was there are so many cool caves, but they're all so blasted expensive and let's be real, all about the same. So we cut out most of them; one we kept on the list was Mammoth Cave.

We stayed at the Singing Hills RV Park for 3 nights. This is a small, privately run campground with it's own private little fishing pond. Everyone was just so friendly. It was peaceful, fun, and relaxing. The office lent out simple cane fishing poles, which we borrowed and tried out that first night (no luck). The next day, we decided to just stick around the campground and fish and hang out, rather than going on a big excursion. We pulled out our fishing poles and caught many bluegill :)

I caught a fish.                                        Megan caught a fish.

Z caught a fish.                                       D caught a foot.

We played soccer, horseshoes, rode our bikes around, and built a campfire to roast hot dogs.

I also successfully removed my bike basket and installed a baby seat on the back of my bike for Daphne, so we can go on family bike rides. It's not an exact fit, but a couple bolts and 14 zip ties later, it's sturdy as can be haha! You'll see pics of it in the next couple posts.

The next day we went to Mammoth Cave. We did the "Domes and Dripstones" tour, which lasted about 2 hours and cost $95 for our family. I was a little surprised when they loaded us on buses to drive almost 10 minutes away, but a guess a cave system with over 400 charted miles is going to have many entrances spread out across the surface! We entered through the "New Entrance" in a sinkhole. It was named that by a George Morrison in 1921. He owned some land near the original entrance and hope that he could discover another entrance on his land, so he looked for sinkholes on his property and blasted until he discovered a new section of the cave system. He started advertising his New Entrance to Mammoth Cave and siphoning visitors to tour his part of the cave. Entrepreneurship at it's finest! Until Mammoth Cave was declared a National Park and his land (and everyone else's nearby) was taken through eminent domain.

The tour takes you down, down, down many flights of stairs, deep into the cave. And then it levels out and we saw some incredible, huge domes (open spaces in the cave) that a mammoth could fit in!

Near the end of the tour, I was feeling a little bummed that we hadn't seen any cool stalagmites or stalactites...and then we saw them. And they were pretty cool. Especially the "Frozen Niagara", this simply massive and majestic flowstone.

All in all, it was a pretty fun, pretty cool cave tour. And I have to give props to our kiddos, we only had to carry D about 2/3 of the way, and mainly so we didn't get left behind haha.

D passed out in my lap on the bus ride back to the visitor's center. 

And even more impressive, they let us drag them down to the Historical Entrance after we got back to the visitor's center, and then even further down to the River Styx Spring where water from Mammoth Cave leaches out of the rock and flows into the Green River. Luckily we brought our "hiking stroller" (Jeep brand with 14-in mountain bike tires) for D and Z and Q powered through their exhaustion with a smile on their face after I promised them we could watch an episode of Gomer Pyle USMC if they finished the hike without anymore complaining haha 😂

The Historical Entrance

What a cute couple                                             The River Styx Spring

When we got back to the RV, the boys forgot how tired they were and asked to go fishing again. We rode our bikes over and caught some more bluegill. As I was helping Q fish, Z was riding his bike around when suddenly he flew past us and launched straight into the pond. He and his bike were completely submerged hahaha. Luckily the pond wasn't too deep, so he was able to stand up and I jumped in to help him out and fish his bike out. Haha we all started laughing (better to laugh than yell/cry!) and Z was a good enough sport to pose for a picture too :)

My Neat Person Spotlight #3 for this stop is actually two people, my sons, Z and Q. They flourished at this campground and went around making friends with all of the other campers, striking up conversations with adults 10-15 times their age. They got to know several couples by name and of course played with everyone's dogs haha. I love them and they inspire me to be more friendly and outgoing. They made such an impression on our neighbors that they left us the below note on our windshield went they left :)