Finally--The Open Road

Knoxville to Mammoth Cave, KY (9/9)
Mammoth Cave to St Louis (9/10):
After spending time with family and friends in Cleveland and Knoxville and after a couple days where everything seemed to be conspiring against our trip, we finally hit the highways and headed northwest. We stuck mainly on state highways and back roads, hoping this would be a more interesting and scenic drive than interstates. These roads went through rolling hills of wildflowers and farms. Federal stimulus dollars are hard at work, as we drove through a bunch of road paving and construction projects marked with Recovery.gov signs. We also passed a number of Missionary and Free Will Baptist churches, though we weren't really sure what those were. We took a side trip to the burial site and museum of WW1 hero Alvin York's. Everything described him as a WWI war hero but didn't really go into detail, which left us confused. Some Wikipedia research shows that he single-handedly killed 28 German soldiers (The Jerries aren't so bad - they're just being led by a rotten apple. -B) and captured 132. (He single-handedly captured 132 Germans? Was he a giant? This is likely not true. -B)

Our first "official" stop was Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, which is the longest cave system in the world. We checked out a tiny portion during a two-hour cave tour. While caves aren't particularly my thing, the rock formations were pretty cool, and this got me excited for all the other national parks we'll be hitting in the coming weeks. We camped overnight at the park. This was the very first time that either of us have camped, so we were both relieved that it was easy and uneventful because a good portion of our trip is relying on pitching our tent at various campsites throughout the U.S.A.

After a morning at the caves, we headed to St. Louis. The land flattened out, and we saw lots of corn. We entered St. Louis in the early evening, and they are not messing around with that Arch. It's huge, beautiful and graceful, which is nice because a lot of times things like that don't measure up to expectations. We'll be visiting it in the morning.
-M