Day Three

We got up early and left Louisville for the Bernheim Arboretum where we walked around for a two hours exploring some of Kentucky's wilderness and looking at different trees. Lisbit was thrilled, as you can imagine, and we got a lot of nice pictures of the landscape, gardens, and lake. It was a very relaxing way to spend some time before driving down to Mammoth.

But, after wandering for a while, we got back in the car and pressed on. It was a quick drive, made easier by our abundance of St. Patrick's day music. Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys, and some tracks from the Boondock Saints all the way! We got to our hotel after driving through Cave City, a massive tourist trap, but it looked like it had some decent junk shops. (I bought my father the larger half of a rather remarkable geode there later this evening).

We took the "Frozen Niagara" tour, which was a quick look into one of the more well-known formations on the far end of the caverns. It was a little too quick, though. We kind of wanted to wander around for a little longer. But that's for tomorrow!

This evening we went to a local So-co restaurant with the intention of ordering fried chicken. Yes, it's cliche, but we were pretty excited about it and thought it would be a good follow-up to our fabulous barbecue / ribs from last night. Well, it was fairly dead in the restaurant, so we just took our seats and told the waitress we'd like to see the menu (the alternative being the buffet). We saw the fried chicken dinner, but it was a dollar more than the buffett, so Dylan went up and scouted it out for us. He came back and said it had all the standards of southern cooking, including chicken and salad, so we all decided to order that and try some of everything.

Now, I cannot stress how small this place was so 1) everyone in the place could hear every thing we said and B) Lisbit and I should have just sucked it up and walked across the room to look at the buffet ourselves. BUT, we decided to just order and save some money. Anyways, we went up to get our food, and it's fabulous. Dylan had loaded up two plates before Lis and I even sat down, Lis had a plate and a salad, and I just started with a bowl of salad. In the time it took us to finish our salads, I'd left the table to go get some of this delicious-looking food that Dylan had been raving about. Very, very loudly Lisbit starts saying (after her first bite of real food) "Oh my God, this is like, the best chicken I've ever had. It's so delicious! You guys..." I take one look at the chicken strips on the buffet and know better, but whatever. I grab a piece and sit down to let this play out. She's still raving about it when I get back to the table. I take a bite, and cut her off mid-sentence, saying, "Lis, you know this is fried fish, right?"

She just stops, looks down, turns kind of red, and says "Oh". Dylan looks dumbfounded (apparently he didn't notice either) and just then the waitress comes over and says, "Hey
y'all, hows it?" "It's really good fish," I reply. "Yes!" she exclaims, clearly ecstatic that one of us stupid Yankees managed to figure it out. It was quite possibly the funniest experience of our entire road trip so far.

That's all for tonight. Hopefully more pictures tomorrow!