Three days.
Twenty-three counties.
Six-hundred and sixty-point-five miles.
Two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Seven cans of Vienna sausage.
One tractor mailbox.
And 30 Dollar General stores.
After six months of news about the novel coronavirus … after 130-odd days of a partial lockdown … after three or four months of wearing masks in public, we needed to break out of town.
We hit the road on a Friday with another healthy and conscientious couple in a style we thought Gov. Beshear would approve of: We wouldn’t leave the state and we would stay mostly outside, well-distanced from other folks.
A waterfall loop in southern and southeastern Kentucky that was highlighted recently at OnlyInYourState.com seemed to fit the road-trip bill perfectly; it would take us to six waterfalls in the foothills of Eastern Kentucky, often via forested trails.
Our companions — I’ll refer to them as Brad and Janet — were perfect choices. We had known them for many years and had traveled with them often. When we’re together, there’s always fun and laughter.
This is an account of what can go wrong — and right — on a road trip these days that was both carefully planned but also spontaneous.
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A/C, please
Brad suggested we take his recently acquired ’57 Chevy, but I was dubious about traveling hundreds of miles in 90-degree weather without air conditioning. (Call me spoiled.)
Ultimately, Brad conceded the point and picked us up in his full-sized four-door very air-conditioned pickup. We would get sweaty, but not because of the ride.
We were scarcely on the road — guys in the front seat, girls in the back — when Donna handed out homemade triptiks with maps and turn-by-turn directions. Then she distributed her big surprise: her custom-made Kentucky Road Trip Bingo cards.
The 40 squares included some easy finds — cell phone tower, roadside produce stand, soybean field — but also included some sights from Donna’s playful imagination. We needed to find a pond with cows in it, a cloud shaped like Kentucky and two kinds of Dollar General stores: one located in a town and one “in the middle of nowhere” (which, we would see, is not that hard to find).
Donna wondered whether her companions would find Road Trip Bingo to be dumb. She needn’t have worried. Brad and Janet took to it instantly. And though Janet ruled that it wouldn’t be a boys vs. girls competition, she proved to have a good eye for the game and was soon chastising Brad and me, saying she was “carrying” us.
As he had threatened to do, Brad brought a couple of tins of barbecue-flavored Vienna sausage, opening one over Janet’s protests about the odor, and happily devoured every sausage, spearing them with a plastic fork. He’s usually generous, but he didn’t offer to share a single one — his way of insisting that they were a precious delicacy unfit for our lips.
Waterfails
Road Trip Bingo helped us cheerfully pass the hours it took to reach our first destination: Seventy Six Falls in Clinton County, which sits on the Tennessee state line. The falls are locally famous, especially among boaters since it’s located on the edge of a cove on Lake Cumberland. As it turns out, Seventy Six Falls can really only be admired from the water, and there were plenty of people admiring it from the various pontoon boats, ski boats, houseboats or while floating in the water. (Were they socially distanced? Not so much.) But we could catch only glimpses of the falls from the land.
It would not be our only setback. Our second stop was to be Princess Falls, located in McCreary County in the sprawling Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. We struggled to locate it; we found many brown tourist signs denoting recreation sites, but none for Princess Falls. As a last ditch, we stumbled into the Yamacraw Day Use Area, found a scarce parking space and consulted a framed National Park Service map; on the side of it was nailed — like an afterthought — a small diamond-shaped piece of sheet metal that bore the words “Princess Falls” and an arrow.
OnlyInYourState.com is a fine website, but its description of the trail to the falls — “an easy, kid-friendly hike” — was an overstatement. In truth, it’s a nearly five-mile round trip that’s studded with jagged rocks and tree roots ready to trip the unobservant.
We were not far down the path when I realized that a second laser surgery on my right eye, performed just 24 hours earlier, was somehow distorting the vision in my untreated left eye. The trail was a blur; I had to turn back. Brad and Janet trekked on, and when they returned more than an hour later, they said I had chosen wisely. Still, it meant I wouldn’t complete the six-waterfalls mission.
Mountainous McCreary
I had said we would merely be in foothills on this trip, but I was mistaken. McCreary County is mountainous, at least by Kentucky standards, and we rarely saw a straight stretch of road there. McCreary County is also impoverished. It’s the only county in the U.S. where the majority of households earn less than $20,000 a year and is the poorest county in the land. As we wound up and down curving Highway 92, we passed countless abandoned roadside houses, country stores and the former Rocky Branch School in nearby Wayne County.
As recently as 2008, a photographer captured some of the former handsomeness of the sandstone school building constructed by the Works Progress Administration and operated from 1938 to 1995; today, gaping holes have opened in the roof, windows are going missing and vegetation is overtaking the building. I’m sure its former students and teachers ache at the sight.
Because we would be traveling near Corbin, where Col. Harland Sanders developed what became Kentucky Fried Chicken, we wanted to visit the museum at Sanders’ Café in North Corbin and order what would be my first-ever bucket of KFC chicken. Alas, we arrived to find the restaurant in a state of reconstruction; the closest we got to the museum was the drive-thru window, where we ordered the $30 Fill Up to take it back to our hotel.
The next morning we drove to nearby Cumberland Falls State Park —the largest waterfall by volume east of the Mississippi and south of Niagara — where we found good views while navigating social distancing from other tourists, including some Amish folks. But the parking lot at Eagle Falls was full. Between that and my hiking vision being in doubt, we abandoned the waterfalls loop and improvised.
Explorations
Not long afterward, Brad pulled into a gravel driveway marked Hughes Cemetery to turn around during out fruitless search for a particular pottery shop. The roadway disappeared into the woods, and he couldn’t resist exploring it. We wound through the forest for a half-mile or more before reaching a clearing where sat the cemetery, which included tombstones for people born in the 19th century and several small stones for infants, some unnamed. It was remote and a little spooky; Donna, normally intrigued by old cemeteries, hovered outside the gate. Just then, a branch fell out of a tree and crashed noisily to the ground. We took it as a sign to beat a prudent retreat.
More promising was a sign in McCreary County pointing out Natural Arch Scenic Area (the Kentucky Geological Survey said our state is considered to have more natural arches than any state in the east). We stuffed the $3 visitors fee into a lockbox at the unmanned entrance and soon found ourselves gazing across a forested valley to a natural bridge stretching nearly 100 feet wide. It was a splendid spot for enjoying a lunch of cheese and crackers. But we really should have hiked what we later learned is a paved trail to view the sandstone arch up close.
I took note of the extraordinary commercial growth that has taken place along Somerset’s busy U.S. 27. When I lived there four decades ago, the only chain restaurant in town was a Jerry’s Restaurant. Today, the highway is home to dozens of eateries, from Mellow Mushroom to Wasabi Express, plus all the usual suspects.
Some miles north, we veered onto Highway 150, stopping in Stanford (“Kentucky’s 2nd Oldest City”) to order fried green tomatoes and a couple of peach cobblers à la mode at the fetching Bluebird Café. We admired the eye-popping planters and hanging baskets that overflowed with flowers along Main Street. But we were saddened to learn that the local mayor who tended the flowers had died in an accident while mowing city property just the week before. Mayor Scottie Ernst was evidently a big-hearted fellow, organizing trick-or-treating in Downtown Stanford, driving the Easter Bunny around and dressing like Uncle Sam for the Fourth of July. R.I.P., Mr. Mayor.
City of Firsts
On to Danville, which a city water tower was painted to proclaim “City of Firsts.”
“What firsts?” Janet asked skeptically. Well, it was the first capital of Kentucky; provided the state’s first governor; was home to the first college, law school and post office west of the Alleghenies and the first courthouse in the state, among other distinctions.
Oh, and on Christmas morning 1809, Danville’s own Dr. Ephraim McDowell performed the world’s first successful removal of an ovarian tumor, without access to anesthesia. The brave patient lived another 32 years. A statue in McDowell’s honor stands today in the U.S. Capitol, and in 1959 his image was placed on a U.S. postage stamp; three hospitals bear his name.
We wandered around Constitution Square, site of a series of constitutional conventions that led to Kentucky separating from Virginia, and its log cabins that are replicas of historic buildings. At the Governors’ Circle, we located plaques of the four governors who hailed from Henderson.
We drove on through rolling countryside, straining to find elusive items on Donna’s Bingo card (a stone fence, a weather vane) and dreamt up items for a new Kentucky Bingo game (like an old-fashioned witch’s hat water tower, a six-foot home satellite dish and a pontoon boat).
Outside Bardstown, we spied our 20th Dollar General store, which had been specially designed to resemble a rickhouse for aging barrels of bourbon, for which the town is famous. Brad stopped and bought five more cans of Vienna sausage, including hot & spicy and jalapeño, that he jealously guarded.
The hotels where we stayed normally offer complimentary breakfast buffets, but you know what kind of times these are. At our Hampton Inn in Corbin, we were handed bags heavy with cereal bars, an apple, a packaged blueberry muffin and other sugary treats; at the Hampton in Bardstown, we got to select items from a menu the night before; breakfast was delivered the next morning to our room.
Bourbon & ballads
Killing time before lunch, we drove by Heaven Hill Distillery to see if a remodeling of the visitors center we had seen previously had been completed. We discovered instead that a sizable expansion is ongoing and will include a replica of the company’s 1935 stillhouse that was destroyed in an infamous 1996 inferno that also incinerated seven rickhouses and 90,000 barrels full of whiskey; 2% of the world’s supply of bourbon was lost in the blaze.
An even greater surprise was the line of people outside the front door. The visitors center wasn’t scheduled to open for another 90 minutes. Turns out folks were waiting in the July heat to be admitted, one or two at a time, to buy a rare bottle of 16-year-old Old Fitzgerald from a small supply being released that day. The price: $230, limit one bottle per customer. They sold out around noon.
Following lunch, we paid a few dollars to walk around the grounds of Federal Hill, the antebellum mansion that’s associated with Stephen Foster’s ballad “My Old Kentucky Home,” until rain chased us away. Foster also wrote American classics like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Swanee River,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Beautiful Dreamer” and much more; he is said to have been the first fully professional songwriter in America. Yet the poor devil drank himself to destitution, living nearly penniless at a flophouse in New York’s Bowery and succumbing to a mysterious death at age 37.
Dodging storms, we drove up U.S. 62 outside Elizabethtown and on to the county where Donna grew up. We looked for the house where she was born (it’s gone) and pointed out the former Caneyville High School from which she graduated as well as the home where she spent her teenage years.
A few miles later, Brad shrieked. There on the roadside stood a tractor-shaped mailbox, painted John Deere green. He had harpooned the white whale that had eluded him for three days and nearly 600 miles. Twenty miles later, we finally spied a donkey.
Alas, some squares on the Bingo card remained unfound; we spotted no buggy road sign, no chicken truck, no sign advertising eggs for sale.
For those, we’ll have to wait for another road trip on some other day.
Guest columnist Chuck Stinnett can be reached at chuck.stinnett@gmail.com.