Road Trip Issue 2023: Mammoth Cave National Park

Scientists at European climate monitoring authority Copernicus Climate Change Service have officially confirmed the story you’ve heard: July 2023 was the world’s hottest month on record. Going someplace where you might want a sweater sounds good right about now, doesn’t it? You could hop a flight to Alaska, or drive four to six hours to the Smokies — or you could spend less than two hours on I-65 and visit Mammoth Cave National Park in south-central Kentucky.

Mammoth Cave, where the temperature inside stays between 50 and 60 degrees year-round, is close enough to Nashville to be a popular day-trip destination; if you grew up near Middle Tennessee, chances are good you’ve been there on a field trip. But staying in a cottage inside the park or finding a spot in one of the small towns nearby is a great foundation for a relaxing, budget-friendly weekend getaway. Cave City, Park City and Brownsville are in the immediate vicinity, while Horse Cave, Glasgow and Munfordville are among the places you can easily reach by car within about 20 minutes. A few minutes more and you’re in Bowling Green.

Stay

Cave City has long been a stop on family road trips, and you have your pick of chain hotels, RV campgrounds and cabins. There are plenty of short-term rentals, too. Want to go glamping in a tree stand? That is an option.

Adventures of Mammoth Cave, a company that offers kayak and e-bike rentals, zipline tours and other outdoor services, also operates The Wayfarer Inn. There you’ll find a handful of cozy rooms with all the basic amenities you could ask for, like a full bathroom, a coffee maker, a mini fridge, TV and Wi-Fi — plus a few extras, like a cozy nook for reading. On a recent stay, we found the location hard to beat: It’s along a beautiful stretch of Old Mammoth Cave Road, a few hundred yards from one of the entrances to the park and a leisurely 10-minute drive from the visitors center. Got a bigger group? Through Airbnb, Adventures of Mammoth Cave also rents the nearby Hanson Cottage, which sleeps up to six.

Do

Mammoth Cave National Park is the biggest attraction in the area, literally and figuratively: The cave system is the largest one known in the world. Some 426 miles of passageways have been mapped since the 18th century, with about 10 miles of that expanse open for touring. Many tours are available; there’s some overlap, but many of them visit different areas of the cave system and highlight different geological features or historical elements. Your options run the gamut from the classic two-hour Historic Tour to the intense six-hour Wild Cave Tour that requires special caving equipment (which the rangers will provide) and beyond. 

We split the difference with the Violet City Tour, a three-hour, three-mile hike. The National Park Service rates this tour as “Difficult.” I found it to be moderate through most of the course, though the climb got pretty strenuous in a few spots, especially toward the end. Our path was lit only by the provided clean-burning flame lanterns we carried, maintaining a fantastic ambiance for our guides to tell us the history that’s known of the cave — and some that we can only make educated guesses about, since there’s evidence that humans were coming into Mammoth Cave before we started recording our history, some 5,000 years ago.

A self-guided tour is a great cost-effective option, but our guides seemed excited and deeply invested in the stories. The Violet City Tour took us to some neat places, though not to some of the most dramatic rock formations in the cave. There are other tours for that — all the more reason to budget for more than one, maybe on different days so you don’t get worn out.

Whatever your days entail, you’ll want to fuel up first. Miss Betty’s Diner in Park City offered heaping plates of biscuits and gravy, and pancakes that were fluffy with a slight crispness on the bottom. Farmwald’s Restaurant & Dutch Bakery, just off I-65 in Horse Cave, has you covered for breakfast plates and sandwiches as well as outstanding cakes, pies, cookies, breads and doughnuts.

Any hike is bound to whet your appetite. Bucky Bee’s BBQ is a highly rated spot in Cave City that recently appeared on the Food Network’s Guy’s All-American Road Trip, and you can choose from competing Mexican restaurants in El Mazatlan and El Acapulco. Cave City Pizza’s New York-style pie was exactly what we were after. The toppings were generously portioned and not too greasy, even considering that we got a Meat Eater (with sausage, pepperoni, ham, bacon and ground beef), and the crust took just the right amount of bite. We loved the cheesy breadsticks, which seemed to be made with the same dough recipe as the crust, and even the salad, often an afterthought at pizza joints, was fresh and flavorful.

We followed that up with a trip to Cave City Coffee and Creamery for some stellar scoops; they serve regionally popular Velvet brand ice cream, made by a family firm in Ohio. For drinks, some live music and maybe a game of pool in downtown Cave City, you can bounce back and forth between The Roxglass and The Dive, which are just a few doors apart on Broadway Street. We rode over to Glasgow’s Drink-N-Game barcade, where there’s an array of multi-game arcade cabinets to choose from at a quarter per play. 

There’s tons more to see and do, both inside the park — come in cooler weather to take advantage of the miles of hiking and biking trails — and outside it. Here’s the tip of the iceberg: Several companies rent canoes and kayaks for floats on the Green River, and if your interest in caves is piqued, there are dazzling show caves at Diamond Caverns and Crystal Onyx Cave, or the Outlaw Cave that’s part of the horseback tour at Jesse James Riding Stables. In Horse Cave, there’s Hidden River Cave, home of the world’s longest underground swinging bridge. You can tour the cave separately or in addition to the attached American Cave Museum, and if someone in your party isn’t into it, there’s a panoply of antique shops across the street. 

You’ll find an abundance of spots catering to the kiddos, including Dinosaur World. Raven’s Cross offers collectibles and activities like sorta-paintball-esque Gellyball throughout the year and a Haunted Village in the fall. The much-loved Kentucky Action Park, home to a well-known Alpine slide, closed during COVID lockdown, but it reopened in August as Mammoth Valley Park.

Mammoth Cave is far enough from Nashville that it feels like a vacation. Depending on your wireless carrier, you might find service in the vicinity to be spotty, which can be a bonus (as long as you’ve written down directions to places you want to go). But it’s close enough that it’s easy to be flexible. I’m a car nut, and we made a stop at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green — exhibit highlights for me included An American Love Affair: 70 Years of Corvette and Custom CARisma — The Legendary Creations of Carl Casper (one word: Batmobile) — and we were still home in time for lunch.

The Road Trip Issue 2023

Five destinations for the perfect weekend getaway — plus details on the best theme parks in the region