We were lucky to be able to visit several of these wonderful places on our recent trip east, and their variety, beauty, and fascination made us extremely proud to be Americans.I'll be giving you more details about our trip in upcoming posts, but here are some glimpses and a few words of description about the parks we visited.
Mammoth Cave National Park is one of the oldest tourist destinations in the country. While in private hands, it hosted guests as long ago as the 1820's. This is a look from just inside the historical entrance to the cave, the only one that was known back then. We were at the beginning of a short guided tour that took us a little way into the amazing cave complex, which is by far the longest known cave system in the WORLD!
There are now several more entrances and we took a long tour the next day starting in one of the newer ones, a hike that included some of the early-explored territory and some passages not discovered until later. One of our guides on that tour was an African-American who is a fifth-generation Mammoth Cave guide. Yes, that means that his earliest guide forebears were slaves owned by the folks who owned the cave in the early 1800's. Talk about history coming alive!
More history was on offer at another one of our stops: Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. This small area at the point where Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virgina come together was one of the best passes through the mountains for the colonists and early Americans wanting to move westward.
Thanks to Henry for taking this picture of the valley into which the Gap leads. (My camera was 
busy drying out from an unfortunate incident that I might—or might 
not—describe in a future post.)An inexplicably vivid memory from childhood perusing of my parents' history coffee table books is the painting at the right of Daniel Boone leading settlers through the Gap...how neat to be able to visit it! [The stop also allowed us to claim 10 states on this junket, since we briefly crossed over into Virginia climbing up the winding trail to the top of the overlook: see the photo of me half in Virginia and half in Kentucky at the left.]
And more history was to come, at the Chickamaugua and Chattanooga National Military Park, a fascinating place whose cheery Chick/Chatt nickname isn't all that appropriate for the somber sites it memorializes. Here's one of the photos we took on the drive around the Chickamaugua Battlefield section of the park:
We really learned a lot on our drive and the next morning in the great Chickamaugua visitor center/museum. Unfortunately we didn't have time to tour the other major battlefield that's part of the park: Lookout Mountain. There was a lot of very important Civil War action in the Chattanooga vicinity in 1863.The other big park we visited was Great Smoky Mountains National Park, another boundary-
straddling area with a parking lot where you can have one foot in Tennessee and one in North Carolina. It features the Appalachians at their loveliest, but unfortunately low-season road maintenance kept us from being able to hike up to Clingman's Dome, the highest point in the park. We did take a nice ramble along the Appalachian Trail, which traces the spine of the Smokies through most of the park, although we didn't make it all the way to Maine! And we had our one camp-out of the trip near the picturesque North Carolina town of Bryson City.This photo, however, was taken just off the highway, when we made a little stop to admire the Oconaluftee River flowing alongside the main park road.
We were able to take advantage of another very scenic road before we even got into the park, as
the Blue Ridge Parkway, which starts in Virginia, where we've driven on it briefly before, ends at the border of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This is a wonderful, wind-y (and, at least occasionally, windy) road with so many pull-outs for great views that it would take you hours to go a few miles if you stopped at all of them. Perfect—apparently, judging from the number of riders we saw—for motorcyclists and little sports cars, it's a great way to get to the park.This photo was taken at the Waterrock Knob Visitor Center on the parkway, where we stopped for a short hike and a little souvenir shopping.
These parks and historical sites are the jewels in the "best idea" crown, but there are national forests with lots of great scenery, too. Here's an example, taken in the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina. The river with the same name is a highly-regarded whitewater stream, judging by the numbers of outfitters we saw and the large number, for a weekday, of kayakers and rafters actually on the river. It was tempting to think about inflating the raft safely stowed in the back of our car, but we contented ourselves with watching the boaters and taking pictures of this really beautiful stream.
Yes, these parks and other collectively-owned lands are a very good idea*.
And citizens from all over were taking advantage of them. This is a collage of license plates we saw in the parking lot at Mammoth Cave. The diversity of states is particularly striking for this location, since Mammoth Cave isn't really near any other large tourist area. These people wanted to go there!
We were very happy to be joining them enjoying the fruits of this wonderful idea.*This isn't supposed to be a political blog, but I couldn't help thinking about the tax dollars required to support this network of parks and other great sites and how some of my fellow citizens don't think this is such a good idea. Perhaps they should show their feelings by putting an appropriate sticker on their cars that would forbid them entry to any of these "socialist" enterprises. I also rather think they should eschew driving on the interstate highway system, too, but I realize that would be a regulation rather difficult to enforce.
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