Mammoth Cave National Park

South-Central Kentucky – Monday, June 5th, 2023

Mammoth Cave was the first-ever U.S. National Park I visited in 2000, and as one of the few national parks within easy reach from the Midwest, was also my second visit in 2006. Since moving to California I’ve made an effort to prioritize national parks in my travel plans almost as much as theme parks; as of this writing I have completed 26 visits to 18 different U.S. National Parks, most since 2015. While Mammoth Cave isn’t my favorite (Sequoia) or even my favorite cave-based national park (Carlsbad Caverns), it’s still special as my first and, with my third visit in 2023, tied for most-visited.

One good thing about cave-based national parks is that they’re fairly easy to schedule into a busy itinerary, since you can usually reserve an advanced cave tour time and know how long it’s going to take. Especially if you’re traveling in the armpit of summer. Of course you can also hike plenty of overland trails throughout the picturesque Kentucky forests and hillsides or book multiple tours (one of these days I need to try a lantern tour). But for a day starting with an art museum in Louisville, a couple hours at Kentucky Kingdom, a forest monster hike at Bernheim Arboretum, and still with a visit to Beech Bend park and an evening in Nashville to go,¹ we’d stick with just the basic two-hour Historic Tour while traveling south along I-65.

I was worried we might run late since the reservation stated tickets must be picked up 30 minutes ahead of our scheduled tour time at 2:45pm, but upon arrival it was clear that was more of a suggested window than anything enforced by the park. Nevertheless, it’s still a good idea to get there early enough to explore the visitor center exhibits to learn more about the park prior to starting the tour. Mammoth Cave has some of the most comprehensive museum exhibits I’ve seen at a national park.

After an orientation and introductions, we begin the tour by descending down through a natural cave entrance. I have noticed the tour group sizes have gotten a lot bigger over the years.

The first big stop is in the Rotunda, one of the largest rooms in the Mammoth Cave complex.

The next part takes us through a massive passageway appropriately known as Broadway.

Being almost perfect preservation chambers, the history of the caves is well-told both by our ranger and by the etchings and artifacts left behind in the cave itself. Stories about topics like enslaved labor in the caves have gotten a lot better over the years.

Giant’s Coffin is a popular landmark along this route, a forty foot long rectangular boulder.

The next part of the tour begins to narrow as we descend deeper into the cave. There’s lots to explore, as Mammoth Cave is the longest-known cave system in the world.

By the time we’ve reached Black Snake Avenue, the large tour group has stretched out and dispersed along the narrow trail, so you can get more space to yourself.

Bridges provide a perilous viewpoint over Side Saddle Pit and Bottomless Pit, neither of which you can see to the bottom.

Fat Man’s Misery is the narrowest passageway on the Historic Tour, at least around your legs.

Finally, the space opens up in Great Relief Hall, which is decorated with many historic signatures on the ceiling. It’s wild to imagine how many tourists still ventured this deep in the cave in the era before electric lighting and level paths were added.

The last part of the tour consists of 155 steps back up through Mammoth Dome. There are some incredible flowstone formations seen as you get higher up.

Then it’s back out the entrance.

Unfortunately since my last visit in 2006, the fungal White-Nose Syndrome has critically harmed Mammoth Cave’s bat populations. We’re asked to clean our shoes as we exit, not for the benefit of Mammoth Cave’s bats but for other bats in places we may visit after our visit.

From the visitor center it’s about a 40 minute drive to Beech Bend park.

Beech Bend Park

Bowling Green, Kentucky

My last visit to Beech Bend was also in 2006. That was a huge year for wooden coasters in the United States, with both The Voyage and El Toro to fight over the #1 spot for many years after, and nearby Beech Bend attempting to make a name for themselves with the installation of their GCI twister coaster, the Kentucky Rumbler. At the time it was expected that, like Holiday World with its installation of The Raven, Beech Bend would use the Kentucky Rumbler as the launching pad for further growth and evolution from its carnival-like origins. Returning 17 years later, it’s clear that transformation never happened. Apart from an expanded water park, this was almost exactly the same Beech Bend I remembered from all those years ago. In total, our visit lasted less than 90 minutes, which was more than adequate to hit the highlights.

Their Sea Dragon ride was acquired from Michael Jackson’s private Neverland Ranch amusement park. Its origin is noted in this plaque; apparently it was Michael’s favorite ride.

The one potential new coaster for me since 2006, an SBF Visa triple-loop spinning coaster called Spinning Out, was not operational. First missed coaster of the trip, although not a huge loss.

Their 2005-installed Zamperla Wild Mouse was operational, so I took it for another spin. Not necessarily one of the better examples of the genre, but it’s still one of the larger and more modern rides at Beech Bend.

SCAT 2 is diabolical. Climb into one of a pair of metal cages, which then spin you around in concentric circles relentlessly. The effect is similar to those old Round-Up centrifuge rides, only far more disorienting. I’d expect the metal mesh design was used for easier cleanup. I skipped it in 2006, but curiosity got the better of me and gave it a spin this visit, proving that wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age.

With its corny hand-painted mural on the front, the Haunted House looks a lot like any number of traveling spook houses, but it’s actually a permanent cinderblock building that appears built in-house. The cinderblock is good at blocking out all light from inside, creating a effective series of jumpscares using the classical carny art of pneumatic pistons, strobe lights, airhorns, and Halloween surplus. A pretty good example of this vernacular genre of amusement ride, and would easily be my pick for the second-best attraction in the park.

Kentucky Rumbler

The best (and really only) reason to visit Beech Bend is still without question the Kentucky Rumbler. While technically a smaller-than-average GCI twister at 96 feet tall and 2,827 feet long, it looks and feels much bigger in this small park thanks to a slight hillside setting and some clever design that makes some of the fan turns feel taller than they are.

I immediately observed a few changes since my last visit during the ride’s opening season. The train is now yellow instead of red, with a simple front grill that no longer has the Kentucky Rumbler letters on it.¹ They had also fixed the flags atop the lift hill, which in 2006 were so big they draped over the path of the cars and everyone had to lift it over their heads as they passed the crest. However I was most surprised to notice a stretch of Titan Track on the first speed curve after the drop, since no announcement had been made at the time. I snapped a few photos and posted them on Twitter; shortly after, Skyline Attractions even reached out to see if they could use my photo in their press release since they never got their own photos of the ride in action on the new track.

The ride begins with an homage to the Rye Playland Aeroplane Coaster with a dip, turnaround, drop sequence. I don’t believe it’s as effective here as the original, due to the profiling that smooths out the difference between segments so there’s very little whip going from the turn into the drop. When the ride was under construction they held a naming contests, for which I submitted a couple of thoughtful references to this connection to history. I later saw on a TV documentary the deliberation process the Jones family took to name their ride, and among the top alternate contenders were “Mad Dog” and “Bodacious”. This is rural Kentucky, after all.

Anyway, after a nice speed hill there’s a long high-speed turn that features the new Titan Track segment. The wooden track has definitely gotten much rougher in its teen years, and I fear that the Titan Track is too much of a contrast that it becomes one of the most salient qualities about the coaster. Even the sound quality of the wheels rolling across the track is quite noticeably different. The transition back to wooden track feels particularly brutal due to the contrast, and I’m not sure if there’s a way to avoid this issue without eventually just converting the whole layout to steel track. The emphasis on replacing high-stress sections of track means the change from wood to steel will not be done artfully in a way that might theoretically complement the flow of the ride choreography.

Once we’re back on the wood track, the remainder of the ride remains rumbly, yet decently long. A high fan turn near the station is a highlight, as are several more station flybys that entertain people waiting their turn. The last part of the ride even ventures downhill away from the rest of the layout for some extra speed to keep the last few curves and airtime pops interesting before it loses its speed to climb back uphill into the brakes. Overall it’s a good example of the GCI house style circa the 2000s, let down somewhat by its advancing age and being in a small park where more intensive wood carpentry restoration isn’t as feasible.

Nashville

Tennessee – Monday, June 5th & Tuesday, June 6th, 2023

From Beech Bend it was a little over another hour drive to our final stop of the day in Nashville, Tennessee. We had visited Nashville a few years prior and did many of the top tourist sights including checking out the honky-tonks on Broadway, trying local BBQ and Prince’s Hot Chicken (the originator of the Nashville Hot Chicken recipe), glimpsing the (now removed) Ugly Nathan Bedford Forrest statue, and getting a tour of Hatch Show Print, highly recommended. Throughout my visits I’d think back onto Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece Nashville, one of the best portraits of an American city committed to film.

For this follow-up visit, I researched eateries in Nashville for our dinner plans and landed on near-unanimous recommendations for a restaurant in the Germantown neighborhood north of downtown called City House Nashville. The food was all incredible, especially their signature “Belly Ham” pizza topped by a fried egg. While food was not a primary focus for this trip, I would easily rate this as the best overall meal I had during these weeks.

The next morning I was again up fairly early for some sightseeing. I briefly stopped along Music Row where many of the city’s recording labels are found, to search out a hidden heart stone along one of the stacked masonry walls.

Top of my list that I didn’t have time for on my previous visit was the Concrete Parthenon in Centennial Park. This full-size replica of the Parthenon in Athens was originally created for Tennessee’s 1897 Centennial Exposition, and shortly later re-built in concrete when popular demand wanted to see the temporary wood-and-plaster structure preserved for the future.

For many years the Parthenon has hosted one of Nashville’s top art museums in its lower galleries.

One gallery focuses on the history of the Parthenon and the Centennial Exposition, always a fascinating topic for the history of themed entertainment. One exhibition called “Night & Day” featured a Dante’s Inferno-themed restaurant with tables made of coffins under chandeliers of skulls and bones. Other zoo-like exhibits of foreign people in stereotyped dress and customs today serves as a reminder of the racist political powers behind this era of expositions.

The main permanent gallery consists of the Cowan Collection featuring artworks from 19th and 20th century American artists (along with glowing biographical details of their donor). Expect a fairly typical assortment of pieces that would have captured the interest of the namesake insurance magnate from a century ago… and thus still to this day determines the type of art available to the pubic at the city’s largest art museum, because that’s how art is made accessible in this country.

The temporary exhibition space houses more specific work by contemporary artists. During my visit was a gallery featuring work by a wet-plate collodion photographer. I even overheard a curator giving a prospective artist a tour of the space for an upcoming exhibition.

On the much larger upper level of the Parthenon is the 42 foot tall statue of Athena. Similar to how the original Parthenon had lost its Athena statue for many centuries, the Nashville Parthenon was originally intended to house a replica Athena statue, but various delays meant it wasn’t started until 1982 and completed in 1990. The painting and gilding wasn’t completed until 2002.

She certainly is impressive, if somewhat intimidating with her piercing blue eyes staring ahead. I was glad to visit early on a weekday morning with few other visitors in the hall.

Standing here, I realized the overlap of Ancient Greek mythology and the American South is a motif I’ve seen more than once before in fiction: Hadestown, O Brother Where Art Thou, the gospel-singing muses in Disney’s Hercules, jazz in Black Orpheus, and I’m sure more. It’s a small subgenre to be sure, but something about the combination seems to click in popular culture; maybe it’s an offshoot of the Southern Gothic tradition, or the prevalence of Greek Revival architecture throughout the South, or something else. I’d be curious if any deeper analysis has been done.

However, once the school groups started to arrive, I took it as my cue to depart. The final stop in Nashville was to get an early lunch at Bolton’s Spicy Chicken & Fish. While Prince’s is famous for being the originator of hot chicken, Bolton’s is famed for long being one of the absolute spiciest examples of the genre; watch the fried chicken episode of chef David Chang’s Netflix series Ugly Delicious for an amusing anecdote about his first time dining at Bolton’s.

Despite going in aware of Bolton’s reputation, and being doubly warned by the chef that even their mild is quite hot to most people’s tastes, I figured I’d be remiss from getting the true “spiciest hot chicken in Nashville” experience if I didn’t at least order a medium level for myself.

Hubris before the fall. I certainly got my wish for an authentically spicy meal, as my mouth hasn’t suffered this much since the first time I tried spicy hot pot in Chengdu… and this was just the medium level! I mean it was great, but my eyes were watering, lips numb, and stomach burning with lava. I didn’t regret it at all, but I did spend much of the following three hour drive south into Alabama questioning certain life choices.

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