We left Thursday, February 27 and hit a few thrift stores on the way to the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area in KY. Always fun to find that special book or other treasure.
Delicious supper in Cadiz, KY, at this unique restaurant. Highly recommend.
Friday morning - drive-through wildlife park.
Also saw elk in the distance but couldn't get a good picture.
Perfect day for a 4.5 mile hike. So pretty.
Life hack #132: don't put a full water bottle in your back pocket and then sit down😬
It was a perfect 70d day though, so Dad's clothes dried quickly while we relaxed in a sunny spot with snacks. Then on to one of the two dams which was built to create the two lakes. Somewhere along the line we enjoyed a very interesting Visitor's Center which explained the history of the land called Between The Rivers (BTR) and its residents who were displaced with the formation of the dams and lakes in the early 1960s.
Saturday morning didn't start out great. Somehow, against all logic, Dad's keys got locked in his running car. How can that even happen with a modern vehicle? We tried to replicate it later. I crouched on the floor so the seat (with a scale) didn't register someone in the car, and every time Dad locked it and shut the door, with the engine running, the door lock immediately popped up. We couldn't get it to lock the keys in the car when we tried so hard and are completely baffled as to how it even happened in the first place. Very strange.
At any rate, a few phone calls and about an hour later, we were on our way again.
Another beautiful day, perfect for wandering a historic farmstead. Very interesting look at how life was in the 1850's Between The Rivers.
*yes the hen is very muchly alive!
Next we headed to a Civil War battlefield. En route, we saw more buffalo,
and did a few short hikes to some really old cemeteries that were on our map. This was fascinating. When the government dammed up the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers which had caused flooding problems for years and thus formed Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, about 2500 people were displaced. Some homesteads were moved; some were razed; some were covered by water. None remain; but there are about 170 cemeteries scattered in remote places throughout the National Recreation Area that was created between the lakes.
Also we saw random patches of daffodils. Apparently daffodils are not naturally spread by birds and wildlife; so these patches were planted by human hands years ago. We were told by someone somewhere (maybe the lady in period dress at the Homeplace?) that these indicate where homesteads existed before LBL was created. This also fascinated me.
Another cemetery.
We saw this cemetery on the map and had wandered around a grassy field looking for it for 20m or so and had given up and were heading back to the car when we saw about three 4x4 trucks wanting to enter the driveway where we were parked. Well, we hustled to move the car so they could cross a pretty shallow but muddy stream that we hadn't wanted to cross; we walked behind them as they drove a quarter mile or so on an almost-invisible path to the cemetery on top of a hill in the complete middle of nowhere. They had to stop their trucks to move a huge log out of the way, so we passed them on foot and had a few minutes of peace in the cemetery before they caught up with us and proceeded to trim weeds. They do this every year to about 170 cemeteries in LBL; they had done about 70 so far this year.
Wandering back roads - another daffodil patch.
Another cemetery.
Finally our destination. Very interesting driving/walking tour.
Earthworks built by soldiers as protection from enemy fire.
And thus ended our touring. We had supper and headed back to our VRBO cabin for a quiet evening. Sunday morning we headed home.
As always, good to go and good to get home.
