A Travel Week

We arrived in Nashville on Friday the 13th and set up in the campground for a 2-night stay. It poured down rain all weekend.

We left on Sunday and headed to Tom Sawyer’s Mississippi River RV Park in West Memphis, Arkansas. We enjoyed a nice view of a very full Mississippi River, only 2.5 feet below flood stage. We watched lots of barges being pushed up and down the river.

On Tuesday, April 17th, we headed to Little Rock, Arkansas for a 2-night stay at one of our favorite Corps of Engineer campgrounds. Maumelle is located on the Arkansas River which is very wide and deep here, compared to back in Colorado. It’s a nice park with lots of shade trees. To my surprise, we saw a push boat with 4 barges. I didn’t know barge traffic came up the Arkansas River.

Thursday we drove to Longview, Texas for an overnight stay at Fernbrook RV Park. We’ve stayed here several times before, because it’s close to our absolutely favorite barbeque place in the USA.

Anyone reading this blog needs to put Country Tavern, just outside Kilgore on Texas Highway 31, on your bucket list. They have the best pork ribs on the planet.

   

We drove through Houston last Saturday morning. The traffic wasn’t too bad as we headed to Goliad State Park for a rainy overnight stay. We left Goliad on Sunday morning and arrived at Victoria Palms RV Resort in Donna, Texas. We’re here for a 2-week stay to visit Julie’s sister Cindy and brother-in-law Terry. We welcomed the warm weather here with daytime highs in the low 80s.

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Mammoth Cave N.P. & Corvette Museum

We drove from Bardstown, Kentucky to Nolin Lake State Park near Mammoth Cave National Park this past Wednesday. Just south of Bardstown, we stopped to see the childhood home of Abraham Lincoln called Knob Creek.

The roads to the state park are in Southwestern Kentucky were very hilly, narrow and curvy but we made it okay. The state park campground was nice and roomy with great views of Nolin Lake.

Yesterday we went out with Vince & Lisa for lunch, followed by a drive to Mammoth Cave National Park. All visits to inside Mammoth Cave are guided tours by park rangers. We decided to sign up for the Historic Tour, a 2-hour, 2-mile tour inside the original opening to the cave.

Mammoth Cave was discovered by Native Americans about 4,000 years ago. Legend has it that the first European to discover Mammoth Cave was either John Houchin or his brother Francis Houchin, in 1797.

Mammoth Cave was designated a National Park on July 1, 1941. It is the world’s longest known cave system with 412-miles of surveyed passageways. New discoveries and connections add several miles to this figure each year.  

We left Nolin Lake State Park this morning and drove about an hour to Bowling Green, Kentucky to visit the National Corvette Museum. They had a nice big parking lot for RVs and buses.

The National Corvette Museum was well worth a trip. The first Corvette was built on June 30, 1953, nearly 65-years ago, and only 300 were built. Most of the Corvettes on display are on loan to the museum by private owners.

We enjoyed lunch at the Corvette Café with Vince & Lisa. Then we said our goodbyes after lunch as we are heading south to Texas and Vince & Lisa are slowly heading back towards Colorado.    

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Kentucky Bourbon Trail

Last Tuesday, April 3^rd, we arrived at Charlestown State Park, Indiana, just north of Louisville, Kentucky for 3-nights. It was our first stop to explore the Kentucky Bourbon Trail with our friends Vince & Lisa.

Our first Bourbon Trail stop was the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience in downtown Louisville. Although they didn’t have a full-scale distillery, it was interesting to learn about the history and process of making bourbon.  

We walked across the street after our Evan Williams tour to take a look at the Ohio River that runs next to Louisville.

On Friday, April 6^th, we drove 70-miles to Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky. We got settled into our campground and headed to the nearby Buffalo Trace distillery. It is the oldest distillery in the country and they had a special government license to distill bourbon during prohibition for medicinal purposes. After the tour we bought a few bottles of our favorite, Buffalo Trace Bourbon Cream at the gift shop.

We went to the Frankfort cemetery to see Daniel Boone’s grave. There is an excellent view of the Kentucky River and the state capital from the cemetery hillside.   

Last Saturday we drove south of Frankfort to the Woodford Reserve distillery. It was in a beautiful setting with all the nearby thoroughbred horse farms. Their distillery tours were complimentary for active-duty and retired military. 

On Sunday, April 8^th, we headed about 60-miles down the Blue Grass Parkway to Bardstown, Kentucky where we had reservations at My Old Kentucky Home State Park for 3-nights.

Monday morning we headed a half-mile down the road from the state park to the Heaven Hill Bourbon Heritage Center. There we saw a presentation and tasted a few bourbons.

We enjoyed lunch in downtown Bardstown and then headed out to the countryside, south of town, to the Maker’s Mark distillery. The distillery was in a nice setting and we enjoyed a very good tour. We especially liked seeing each bottle of Maker’s Mark being hand-dipped in the 400-degree red wax before being boxed up for shipment.

We head up to Nolin Lake State Park for a couple of nights to go visit Mammoth Cave National Park on Thursday.         

Steve & Julie Cornelius

Nashville

We enjoyed our 3-night stay in Nashville. We went out for dinner on Saturday night at Bavarian Bierhaus Nashville, opened in April 2017, and located in the Opry Mills shopping area near the Grand Ole Opry. The German food was good and the beer was even better.

We went to the Grand Ole Opry after dinner. We bought tickets last November so we had good seats on the main level near the stage. The two-hour long radio show, performed in the Grand Ole Opry house, has been broadcasting country music since 1925. It was fun to watch legends, such as Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stuart, as well as up-and-coming country music stars. This show was headlined with Lee Greenwood who sang two songs, including my favorite “God Bless the USA”.  

On Monday afternoon we took the “Downtown Shuttle” from our RV park to downtown Nashville for only $10 per person for a roundtrip ride. The shuttle dropped us off outside of B.B. King’s blues club. We walked a couple of blocks to the “Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum”. It was interesting and we spent a couple of hours there looking at the displays and artifacts of old and current country music stars.

After the museum, we walked over to Broadway to check out some of Nashville’s famous honky tonks. There’s all kinds of music from rock ‘n roll, country, blues, jazz, etc. There’s no cover charge and the bands play for tips. Lots of fun.   

Today we drove up to Louisville, Kentucky and just up into Indiana where we’ll stay for 3-nights at Charlestown State Park. It’s our first stop to begin exploring Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail.  

Steve & Julie Cornelius