4/11 – 4/12/19
4-11
I had been meaning to visit Mammoth Cave for years; and having now reached the right corner of Kentucky, I decided that only the Grand Avenue Tour – the longest and most ambitious available on weekdays – would provide a proper sense of the world’s longest subterranean complex. That it did. Four hours and a little over four miles long, the tour took in echoing caverns, endless corridors, and the gorgeous flowstone formations of the Frozen Niagara. I emerged into the too-bright sun and surprisingly warm afternoon entirely satisfied.
Before leaving the national park, however, I stopped to see Sand Cave, center of the media circus that surrounded the entrapment and tragic death of cave explorer Floyd Collins in 1925. I found few traces of the shaft driven down in a futile attempt to rescue Collins; and the flowering dogwoods and April breeze seemed to belie the grim story of the cavern below.
I continued to Louisville, arriving just after the evening rush. Parking in the beautiful Victorian neighborhood known (less than creatively) as Old Louisville, I biked around downtown, back through Old Louisville, and out to Churchill Downs. Then, after recovering all burnt calories at a fried fish place on the banks of the Ohio River, I continued to my last motel.
4-12
Before setting out on the long ride home, I stopped in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery, home (among other luminaries) to Muhammad Ali and Colonel Sanders.
The rain that had pattered on my jacket at Cave Hill slackened soon after I crossed into Indiana, to be replaced by a strong west wind that shook even my small rental car. The wind continued to howl as I exited in Indianapolis to visit yet another nineteenth-century cemetery. I have something of an obsession with the tombs of lesser-known presidents; and knowing that Indianapolis’ Crown Hill Cemetery was the final resting place of Benjamin Harrison – president from 1889-93 and remembered for nothing in particular – I was determined to visit, particularly since Crown Hill also hosts two even more obscure vice presidents. Harrison’s tomb, needless to say, did not disappoint.
After a chili lunch, I continued north to my penultimate stop, the site of the Battle of Tippecanoe, where William Henry Harrison (Benjamin Harrison’s grandfather) won his famous victory over the Shawnee in 1811. The grandiose granite obelisk marking the site of the battle, surrounded by a lawn of barren oaks, was swept by the inescapable wind, which whipped dried leaves past my feet as I walked back to my car.
As I approached I-80 and the last leg of my homeward drive, I exited the interstate for a brief final stop. During the Eisenhower administration, several dozen missile installations were constructed in and around Chicago to ward off, or at least retaliate against, a Soviet nuclear attack. Most of these bases, decommissioned during the era of détente, were dismantled decades ago; but I had read about an intact one just outside Portage, Indiana, only a few miles from my route. So thither I went. Lacking the time or inclination to find a way through the rusty cyclone fencing, I contented myself with walking the perimeter of the old base and taking a few pictures of the launch pads and maintenance buildings. Then, staggering slightly in the gale-force wind, I returned to my car, the highway, and home.