Tennessee Road Trip Part 5: Bonnaroo to Boston

The grand finale (pretend there's one of those accent marks there ok thanks) to this extensive two-week road trip.  A bittersweet ending to a great adventure.

Mon. 6/17/13
The sounds of tent deconstruction woke us up early on Monday.  Which filled me with a nameless dread because we had to do the same.  Surprisingly, it wasn't as horrible as I initially assumed; within an hour we were all packed up and filling the car, which Scott had driven up to the tent-only area.  We said our tearful goodbyes to all the friends we had met and by 8:30 we were driving north toward Kentucky.
Five minutes after crossing the border into the eleventh state on our road trip, we stopped at a Waffle House for breakfast.  I ate more than humans are known to eat, including a crazy huge portion of hashbrowns.  Flushing toilets were a scary and foreign concept to me.  (So foreign, in fact, that I forgot to flush that first time.  Whoopsidaisy.)
We drove a little bit further to south-central Kentucky before entering Mammoth Caves National Park, our next destination.  Most activities in this park include taking part in some form of a guided cave tour into some section of the 400 mile long cave system.  What better way than to get started right away!  We first joined the "Historic Cave Tour," which is a short two-mile loop in an extremely wide cave segment.  This cave is enormous, and this portion was about 40 ft high and quite wide.  But there were also sections called "Fat Man's Misery," which required you to make some interesting twists and turns if you happened to be portly.

I've never been in a cave of this size before

Olde-timey graffiti is still graffiti

This cave is really dry, which meant no stalactites or stalagmites.  A lot different than Carlsbad Caverns.
The second tour we joined required a bus to take us five miles away to a different entrance - this one created by dynamite rather than natural causes.  This is the longest cave system in the world and we ended up seeing a combined three miles of it.  The temperature differences between the outside and in the caves was astounding.  Probably a 30 degree difference if not more.  It was the first time I used my sweatshirt on the trip other than a pillow.
This section of the cave was a bit different in that it had three distinct segments: one in which the cave was expanding and dripping water, one that was wider and drier, and a third section that reminded me of a quintessential "cave experience" with familiar cave geology like pillars, stalactites and stalagmites.  The Frozen Niagara, one such area, reminded me of Carlsbad Caverns.  Really cool stuff.

Caving Champions

Cave stuff

EVEN CAVIER STUFF

But the tour was only three quarters of a mile, so we were done and back on the bus pretty quickly.  People were asking the dumbest questions, like "when do the two hours start" as the guide was reading the government mandated rules.  Michelle got hilariously snarky, making comments that had me loling a bit too loudly and mentioning that cave monsters eat children.  She had slept a lot on the ride, but it appeared that she could use a bit more.
Back at camp, we set up the tent and Can Jam.  After two "defeats," Michelle and I destroyed Scott and Sarah when I JAMMED THE CRAP OUT OF THAT CAN.  We cooked dinner over a fire, which included ALL the rest of the food we had and two cases of beer.  It actually ended up being a lot of food.  Before I knew it I was exhausted and went to bed.  I followed through on my threat to steal Michelle's star pillow, since she failed to give me my sweatshirt pillow the previous night.  So I was having a great sleep with pillows and everything when Michelle wakes me up for her pillow back.  I said "let's wait on it."  She asked "when?" to which I honestly replied "when you forget about it."  And it worked.  I had that pillow for the entire night.

Tue. 6/18/13
It was pouring out when we woke up, so we decided to keep sleeping until it calmed down.  Scott, Sarah, and Michelle had all left things outside to dry... it seems to have had the opposite effect.  We saw a crapload of wild turkeys on our way out of the park, but we were so used to them at this point that we didn't even care.
We continued driving north through Kentucky until Cincinnati, crossing the river into Ohio.  It was here that I had the brilliant idea to have lunch at the Munich Beerhall recreation of Hofbrauhaus.  I've been there before during a week of training for work: it was delicious.  A liter of german beer and a bunch of bratwursts.  It was so good.  I let Scott drive the rest of the way for today.

They unfortunately don't have a larger size

JFK apparently was caught trying to steal one of these back in the day

Cincinnati over the river.  That place is pretty decent.

After a few more relatively uneventful hours in Ohio, we stopped near Columbus at Scott's parents' house.  A nice little farm house on a big plot of land with corn a-growin'.  We rode in the Mule around the property to see everything and then we spent the rest of the evening shooting clay pigeons with shotguns until dinner.  Good times.

Farm stuffs

THIS IS HOW I HUNT

Game Face

Scott's parents made us a lovely dinner and I took the first shower in like six days... the first real one, because the one at Bonnaroo barely counts.  Later at night I went out to look at the stars and fireflies out in the fields.  These are the normal fireflies that I'm used to seeing in PA.  Not as incredible as the Synchronous fireflies, but still amazing.  I probably stayed out there watching them and stargazing for half an hour.  At some point we went out for an unreasonable amount of ice cream and went to bed before an early morning.

Wed. 6/19/13
I think it was my dread of returning back to my normal life mixed with a few hiccups during the drive that put me into a sour mood.  Which is not how I want to end a great road trip.
The day started with a great breakfast provided by Scott's parents.  Today, however, we packed up two cars.  Scott is starting his new job that requires a car soon, so he's taking up his old Mustang.  This relieved some of the space issues we were having.  By 7:30 Michelle and I were driving Soup and Scott+Sarah were in the Mustang, heading out for a supposedly 13 hour drive to Boston.  We had walkie-talkies, codename Winterfell for Scott's car and Riverroon (the Robb accent on "Riverrun" is critical) for mine.
Most of the drive was fairly boring.  Driving across PA was beautiful; I had never been to that side of the state before.  Naturally we had to stop at Wawa near Scranton, where I proceeded to drop my hoagie.  No matter, I was given another for my folly.
The trouble hit right around New York.  Scott decided to get EZpass, so we went on ahead through the toll.  Some issue with the overpass had forced 20 cars to pull over to the side of the road, but I had no idea what the cause was at the time.  Scott found out for us.  Apparently there was some piece of something on the overpass just hanging out damaging cars like a boss.  I was lucky, but Scott's oil tank got destroyed.  Winterfell was taken out of commission by a bridge: kind of ironic.
We had to wait a few hours for the police report and for the tow trucks to finish with everyone else to come pick Scott's car up.  Luckily we had my car to fall back on and no one got stuck in NY.  So we all piled into Soup and continued on our merry way to Boston.  Two horrific bouts of traffic later and we finally made it, in only 16.5 hours.  So fun.  I didn't get to sleep until 1:30am.
Not a great way to end the road trip, but I think a round of Thorns and Roses would be a great way to put some perspective on it.  My thorn was definitely the fog in Shenandoah - we just couldn't see anything in the park: a 120 mile drive through a ping pong ball.  My rose was a tie between the insane synchronous firefly show and Paul McCartney singing Live and Let Die.  So epic.

Another successful road trip completed