Last week, I was left home alone as Amy drove to Louisville, KY to drop the girls off with her parents (her parents drove down from ChiTown). This week I wasn’t so lucky. After a night of pyro at the Ted, I had to pile in the car with the loved one and head north. The drive north wasn’t too bad. You can see the route we took at GPSed. We made good time heading north through Tennessee and Kentucky, we even had a chance to stop a K-Mart just north of Nashville and pick up diapers for the ‘M’ as they had very few left… We toyed with the idea of stopping at a winery or two along the way or at the Jack Daniels Distillery, but kept going on.

Instead we made a side trip to Mammoth Cave. The “longest” cave system in the world (which, from where I sit, could be a hard thing to determine…). We got there and drove through the very scenic park and made our way to the visitor’s center to see about a tour or two. All the “guided” tours were pretty much sold out and all they had left were tickets for the self guided one. That tour is about an hour and a half, and as we were in shorts, t-shirts and sandals and not really packed to go caving at all, we decided to take a rain check and come back one day for a week or so when we can do all the fun tours. Plus, the girls would miss out! Can’t have that!

We decided on our drive back to the interstate that on EVERY road trip no matter what it was for, we’d make an effort to stop somewhere zainy. We pasted an odd assortment of “fun” parks on our way back to the highway and decided that we’d stop at Dinosaur World on our way back home on Sunday. We hit the interstate and continued our trek north.

Even with the stop we made pretty good time and managed to hit a traffic jam just south of Louisville that slowed us down for about half an hour. Finally we pulled in to the hotel just about 6pm. It wasn’t too bad. We hit a restaurant called KingFish for dinner, went back to the hotel and crashed.

It was good to see the munchkins again after a week. Its hard being away from them (despite the fact that it was nice to have a “little” bit of quite around the house). It seems that they grew up a lot over the week (Emma is talking more and Grace is just Grace). If I could bottle them and keep them this way forever I think I would….

We woke up Sunday morning, packed the cars, said our tearfull goodbyes and headed our separate ways. Grammy and Breezy headed north, we headed south with two girls crying in the back. The tears were quickly quieted though as we pulled in to a McD’s for some browns and milk. We also told them we decided to stop at Dinosaur World on our way home, so there was something fun to look forward to!

Dinosaur World is in Cave city, right off the interstate. You can see the big dino and the mammoth’s from the highway. It was actually cooler than you’d think (they have huge statues of dinosaurs everywhere) although I’m not too sure it was worth the $13 per adult we had to pay. The girls had fun though (Grace has already asked to go back) and they got to do a fossil dig. I’ve got some cool photos from DW that I’ll be uploading shortly.

The rest of the drive south was almost as unevenful as the drive north. Gas in TN was as low as $3.25 a gallon, almost a full dollar down from two months ago. That was really nice to see. I don’t think I’d do the drive like that again though, I’d spend a day in Louisville or the Mammoth Cave area…. all in all its good to be home.