HORSE CAVE, Ky. — Say you’ve been driving all day in the heat, as I had several weeks ago, and you’ve made it through Nashville unscathed, and you’re in Kentucky rolling up I-65 thinking about where you might pass the night.
About 20 miles northeast of Bowling Green you enter cave country. Exit 48 takes you to Mammoth Cave, the longest known cave system on the planet.
Cave City and Horse Cave are next and, as their names suggest, have their own subterranean attractions.
Having visited these towns before and charmed by their apparent indifference to modernity, I took Exit 53 for Cave City in search of lodging for the night.
Resisting the allure of the known, the chain hotels that cluster like mushrooms at roaring Interstate exits, I drove about a mile to US 31W where I took a left and immediately found myself stepping back in time. Tourist courts, 1950s vintage motels, shared the roadside with mom-and-pop stores and drive-in dairy bars.
At the Historic Wigwam Village, an entrepreneurial effort featuring individual cement wigwams, I stopped to breathe in the ambience and snap a picture. At $120 a night, I wasn’t biting. Maybe if small children had been on board.
About five miles farther you come to Horse Cave and, on the right as you enter town, the Horse Cave Motel.The motel is a semi-circular affair with four-foot-high white cement horses standing sentinel at the entrance and exit.
My room offered a view of a block building housing both an auto parts store and a jewelry shop called Sonny’s Settings. Beyond that are verdant hills. Cars and pickups, their drivers apparently in no hurry passed to and fro. You can actually open the windows in the room, a rarity in modern motel rooms.
How distant this all seemed from the Interstate and its trappings not more than half a dozen miles away.
Downtown Horse Cave is dominated by antique arcades, a check cashing store and a large, two-story storefront enclosing the entrance to Hidden River Cave. There is an IGA and a well-worn Walgreens about a half mile from downtown.
Years ago we stopped here for breakfast at a local place cluttered with rusting pitchforks, mule harnesses and the like. That diner has been supplanted by the C&J Cafe, housed in a freshly painted brick building on North Dixie Street. I went there the next morning for breakfast.
My waitress, Kathy Atwell, a cheerful woman in a bright print dress, told me the building once had been a doctor’s office (where her oldest daughter had been born), a tattoo parlor (where she had her ankles tattooed) and a pizza parlor.
Kathy said she came in most mornings to help her friend Chena Watt, who owned the cafe.
When I said something about needing my glasses, she said she was helpless without hers. “You might be Elvis Presley and I wouldn’t know it,” she said.
The host of a call-in radio program in nearby Glasgow refers to Kathy, a frequent caller, as “the joke lady,” she said.
After an omelet, toast and several servings of wisdom from my waitress — “If we thought about things before we done ‘em, the world would be better off” — I headed off to get provisions for the road.
At Walgreens, two employees were sitting on the curb next to the store smoking. When asked what time they opened, one of them looked at her watch and then stubbed out her cigarette on the pavement. “It’s almost 8; we’ll open for you,” she said.
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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