June 18, 2019
By: Erin Leydon
Usually, I wake up to a chorus of alarms in the morning from whoever is sleeping closest to me, but today, I woke up to the sound of heavy rain against the roof of our tent. It’s always a bit of a bummer to have to either set up or take down tents in the rain, but we’ve been pretty lucky during this trip so far in terms of weather. This morning, however, we were very unlucky. We had a slow morning of taking down tents and tarps and wadding up the wet material into trash bags to throw into the car. I noticed we all kept trying to stay dry while getting ready for the day, even though we were all going to get soaked as soon as we started biking.
Once we started biking, it was still raining. Some people seem not to like biking in the rain, but I really enjoy it. The rain always feels really refreshing to me, and I guess it’s good to keep a positive attitude about different kinds of weather, because we’re going to see our fair share of many different kinds, so we might as well enjoy them. Here are some of the pictures I got from the rainy portion this morning in Mammoth Cave National Park:
For lunch, we stopped on the side of the road at a store that was closed. As we were sitting there, eating, the owner of the store showed up. He was incredibly nice, and he talked to us about what we were doing and his experience with bikes. It was absolutely fantastic, and great to find a stranger who was so nice and welcoming.
From there, the weather improved drastically. Suddenly it was sunny and beautiful outside, so when we arrived at our lodgings for the night and heard that there was a lake nearby, we were pretty excited and started making plans to have a picnic dinner of KFC at the lake. We settled in The Resort of Falls of Rough by drying out our wet tents and leaving out our many pairs of shoes to dry and talked to the manager, who was extremely nice and even offered to clean all of our dirty laundry. Here is a picture of all our shoes hung up to dry:
After we all had a bit of time to relax, Caralyn and Evan went to KFC and bought an ungodly amount of fried chicken and brought it over to the lake, where the rest of us were hanging out and swimming (We had decided that we couldn’t leave Kentucky without visiting a KFC). It was pretty impressive how much KFC we were able to eat. When I saw the number of buckets that Caralyn and Evan had bought, I thought there was no way we would be able to finish, but we did. We then came back to our room and now we’re all quite tired (Probably because of the enormous dinner we just had). In fact, I am nodding off as I write this. Goodnight, and thanks for reading! Enjoy some pictures from tonight!
