Multiple Spring Breaks at Mammoth Cave

Chapter 12 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

I started working on a camping memoir five years ago but abandoned it after a year of detailed work because the time just wasn’t right. Now I am ready to get back to the work I started and turn it into a true memoir of the first 21 years of marriage and parenting. If you want to get regular updates on this project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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Our first spring in Indianapolis, Jeff and I hadn’t made any plans for a spring break trip and we weren’t looking forward to just staying at home. Set building for the spring production of Cinderella was on hold for the week, and so we looked for something that we could do that would be quick, relatively cheap, and new. 

We discovered Mammoth Cave National Park.

We had actually been interested in Mammoth Cave since we had planned our honeymoon to Tennessee several years earlier. We were looking for things to do while we were in the Smoky Mountains and one of the things that came up on a search of things to do in Kentucky and Tennessee was Mammoth Cave. We quickly learned that the two national parks were nowhere near each other and scrapped the idea of heading there altogether. 

But now a quick trip to Kentucky was only about three hours from central Indiana, the pictures of the region looked beautiful, and we were ready to do some cave exploring. So we packed up our camping gear, Sierra, and headed down south. We had made reservations at the national park lodge for our first night and got a spot for Sierra in the kennel that is located right across the parking lot from the lodge.

The next day we pitched our tent in the National Park campground, perfectly content with our electric-free campsite, and set out to explore the national park. Mammoth Cave National Park encompasses the world’s longest known cave system, with a total of 400 explored miles.¹ People have been exploring and taking the public on tours through the cave for over 200 years, and it became a national park in 1941.² During the two full days we were there, we took two different tours, enjoyed the peaceful quiet of our off-the-grid campsite in the national park, and planned for which tours we would want to take the next time we came to visit. The following year we returned for a nearly identical spring break trip. The truth was, it gave us a quick getaway for part of my spring break and forced me to take a mini-vacation while I was in the yearly midst of production for the spring musical.

And yes, nearly two years after I decided that we didn’t need to have a National Parks Passport book, we bought our first one, getting a stamp at the visitor’s center and then paging through all the possibilities for future vacations across the country.

We always said we wanted to return to the national park once we had kids, but when we quit camping it just didn’t seem like the ideal trip anymore. Besides, we wanted to see different places and the timing just never seemed right for a return. For the next couple of years, if we did take a spring break trip to escape the remnants of winter, we headed much further south to guaranteed warmer temperatures and sunshine. (It helped that Jeff’s parents have timeshares in Florida that they are more than happy to use to host the whole family.) But as with most things in our lives, buying our second camper lead to a complete shift in the way we viewed vacations, and this was true of our last spring break up north.

While we didn’t know for certain that the spring of 2015 was our last spring up north, at least for a while, we could see the writing on the wall.³ In the time since we had purchased our new camper, we still had not made the trek back to Mammoth Cave National Park, this time with our kids. We had intended to take our kids down to one of our favorite National Parks for a long time, but something told us that it was now or never, and so we packed up for an early spring adventure six hours south of our Fort Wayne home. 

Because our goal is to visit as many new places as possible, it is frequently difficult to pick favorite trips and locations, even though we do have them. But the fact that we returned to Mammoth Cave National Park twice in our childless years (and now twice in our parenting years) is a pretty clear indicator that we have deep appreciation for both the national park and the surrounding area.⁴ We were also absolutely certain that our kids would love their experience in the park as much as we had on our previous two visits.

It had been a miserably cold winter, following a miserably snowy winter the year before. We thought that the venture into Kentucky would give us a break from the severe northern cold that still lingered into late March, but we woke up on our first morning at a KOA only to discover a frozen water hose and a stream of water coming from the water spigot of the camp site across from us, the result of the previous camper pulling off their equipment without a proper shut off, probably because their equipment was frozen as well. Reassured that the freeze had not damaged any of our equipment, we threw on layers to prepare for changing temperatures throughout the day and prepared to show our kids why we had fallen in love with Mammoth in our mid-20s.