"I think we're both responsible for this," said Natalie, as we crouched beneath dripping rocks to climb the 12th set of slippery, dimly-lit stairs. She was right. I thought she wanted to go on a Christmas trip, and she thought I wanted to, and that's why we were panting with effort some 270 feet underground and slightly less than 40 percent through a rigorous tour of Mammoth Cave.
I should report that despite its leaky basement, Mammoth Cave National Park in western Kentucky is a thoroughly lovely place and at 317 miles from East Mulberry Street is distant enough so you know that you've actually been somewhere. It is also utterly wholesome, with a neatly-kept hotel, a gift shop with local crafts unrelated to moonshining, and a restaurant that serves nothing that kids might actually have to chew. The park teems with immaculately uniformed park rangers, some of whom are young women.
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Wake up in Wigwam Village, a piece of Americana
When Sahidur Mir first heard about his brother-in-law's plan to buy Wigwam Village Inn 2 near Cave City, he was skeptical.
A native of India, Mir had been in the United States less than a year and couldn't grasp the idea that people would pay money to spend the night in what essentially were concrete cones.
"So, people are going to stay here?" he remembers thinking.
Almost three years later, after managing the 15 "tepees" that make up Wigwam Village, Mir still doesn't know the difference between a wigwam and a tepee.
Of course, Wigwam Village is neither.
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Its cabins are neither dome-shaped, like a wigwam, nor are they mobile, like a tepee. They are steel-reinforced cones stretching 30 feet high that form a semicircle around a more than 50-foot high central cone.
Wigwam Village, which has been on the National Register of Historic Places since the late '80s, is celebrating its 70th anniversary. It's the second of seven Wigwam Villages, and one of only three still standing. The other two are in San Bernardino, Calif., and Holbrook, Ariz.