KY Trio Tackles Hike from Hell in LBL

Friday, May 20 through Sunday, May 22, 2005

Hey, All!

As has become tradition, Jennifer, Gena and I have collaborated to bring you another entertaining presentation on our last vacation adventure. It started on May 20, 2005. This time we went to Land Between the Lakes to enjoy the scenery of Lake Barkely. This is a teeny trip compared to the previous ones before this year, but it was challenging in a whole different way. More, it was the first time in half a decade that we shared our travel experience with a third party, our friend, Gena.

What better friend to go slogging with us, than Gena?

Friday May 20, 2005 --Departure Day

Jennifer and I managed to leave work a little early Friday afternoon, so we could get home and pack. Naturally, we'd left everything for the last minute, so it was a mad dash to cram all of our things into a duffel bag and be ready to meet with Gena. One wouldn't guess so much stuff would be necessary for a two-night stay out of town! But we managed to put all of our food and beer into a cooler, ourselves shoehorned into the car and Gena in the back seat while running only a few minutes behind schedule. Our goal, of course, was to get out of the city's rush hour traffic before we'd consider having a meal on the road. Once we hit the Parkway, I subjected us to some rap music from 1982-1995; in other words, rap in its heydey, before it declined into the modern phenomenon of misogynistic men shooting each other. Back then, it was just good, innocent sexism, objectification and self-aggrandizement.

EZ Stop Food Mart-- the "GasDieselCafe"

This was our first stop, about 50 miles outside the city. We were all starved and it looked like as good a place as any to have our little picnic dinner. We went inside to purchase some drinks and use the ATM, during which time, I whispered, "My god, I'm in hell!" It was a classic rural truckstop, complete with old, obese men clad in overalls sitting outside, cradling their beer guts on protesting knees while commenting on sports and the sinful world. Inside, the place was crowded and cramped, with a quaint greasy-spoon cafe next door, juxtaposed next to the place where they sold bait. Um...we chose to eat in the confines of the car, where we folded our ankles against our cheekbones to best pass bagels, lunchmeat, cheese, mustard, chips and cookies around to each other.

The restrooms...urk! Both the women's and men's had signs on them that said "If door is locked, it is occupied." I tried the door and it wasn't locked, so I walked confidently inside to find it occupied, anyway. WTF!? I thought. Then I realized that the door didn't actually stay shut at all. What the sign meant was that if the knob was locked, someone was in there, so don't pull the loose door open. In other words, you had to hurry before someone walked in on you. Gak!! I was glad to leave the place behind, though Gena found it quaint; she even titled it the "GasDiesalCafe." But even she said she wouldn't want to work there or even break down at that location.

Liquor or Don't Liquor

About two hours into the trip, Jennifer suddenly realized we'd forgotten the big bottle of Maker's Mark whiskey we had purchased specifically for the trip. Yes, it was a joint-effort by two people with Master's degrees to make this amnestic miracle happen. She had put all of our foodstuffs together in one place at the bottom of the refrigerator. I later moved the whiskey bottle to the freezer because...well, I wanted it colder. So when Jennifer grabbed everything from the one spot, that bottle got left behind. It was intended as part of our celebratory weekend, as it was quite expensive and not something we had that often. Sort of like champagne. It put kind of a dampening field on the trip for awhile, but we eventually waxed philosophical, figuring we'd find a small store along the way and replace it.

Her Teeth Know No Fear Of Corn

At around the third hour, we stopped for a restroom break and some refreshments at a small gas station. While there, Gena asked about a local liquor store. The cashier was a woman with teeth like a lawn rake and an annoying tendency to smile too much and expose us to them. She brayed out an answer to our question and we left. But I mentioned when we got outside that the woman would never have any problems with eating corn on the cobb because nothing could possibly get wedged between those spacious pearlies (except maybe the cobb itself). In retrospect, I'm not sure if she just had an enormously large mouth, or only half as many chompers. I guess we'll never know.

We did, for the record, manage to find the liquor store and restock our supplies.

Arrival In Cadiz, Kentucky

Nothing particularly spectacular here. We got to the motel, checked in, got edgey-cated by the grandmotherly desk clerk about the colloquial pronunciation of the town's name (KAY-DEEZ) and spent the evening looking at trail maps while watching Indecent Proposal on cable. Then we went to bed.

Saturday, May 21, 2005--The 10.1, Ten Miles of Exquisite Undulation

The next day, we loaded up Gena's backpack, got on the road and found the LBL Visitor's Center, which was about 20 miles or so away from the motel. Along the way, we had to cross a bridge over Lake Barkely that was so narrow, I couldn't help but imagine sinking beneath the waves in the car if my attention wavered and we went over the side. I was hit with a wave of deja vu while we were there, because I had been there some 22 years ago while still in grade school and some parts of it hadn't changed that much. The old planetarium was one of the fixtures.

The guy at the information desk didn't have much information, so we had to travel 20 more miles to the next station to get any input on the trail Gena and Jennifer had planned out for us. But we did find it...a 14-mile beast guaranteed to give us our money's worth. We all figured the full 14 miles would be too much, but we didn't quite know our limits at the time.

Gena scouted out the trail, and we put our feet in front of us. Incidentally, we only had one backpack and Gena insisted on carrying it the whole time as practice for a future, even more rigorous hike she was planning. For the first leg, she referred to herself as the "packmule," which is why she brought up the rear.

Bikers Galore

The trails are places for both hiking and biking recreation. How anyone plows up and down those undulating hills and roots on a bicycle is beyond me, but there were athletic types gutsy enough to do it. Several times during our hike, we had to get off the trail and let them speed past us. I worried each time that we would stray into poison ivy or a snake's fangs, but it never happened.

The "Nature Break"

No phone. No light. No motor car. Not a single luxury. You know the song, right? ;) Anyway, LBL trails are not like milder trails in other locations. There are no benches, no rest stops, no concrete lookout platforms, and most of all, no restrooms. The only concession to civilization out there are the well-trodden trails themselves, the colored markers on the trees to keep hikers from getting lost, and the little bridges over the deeper trenches. We took plenty of water but only light food, because of the aforementioned lack of facilities.

Others didn't plan so well. On the second leg of the hike, with Gena in the lead, me in the middle and Jennifer bringing up the rear, we spotted a couple of figures, one of them off the trail to the left, squatted down. When they stood up, I realized that person was pulling up their pants. I immediately turned and warned Jennifer not to look that someone was relieving themselves. I figured it was a woman, for obvious reasons, but was corrected by Gena later, who saw more of the event than I did before she could look away. Ew! It wouldn't have been so unpleasant if the person in question had at least tried to find a place off the trail to conceal himself. But apparently, he figured 20 feet away in broad daylight would be sufficient. We waited and stared at the scenery in any other direction to give them time to move on. They thanked us later and apologized for our catching them "in the middle of a nature break."

Behold Lake Barkely, with Not a Scrap of Canvas

We eventually found a point where the trail ended at a dropoff into Lake Barkely. It was gray water, as the day was relatively overcast and we could hear the motor boats zipping past. Gena noted that motor boats were all we could see, that no one was sailing. I pointed out that it is probably a difference in attitude from more coastal regions. Lakes are calmer than the sea, plus the people probably just expect not to have to work as hard in order to move in the water.

Is this Death? Jennifer and Gena stand rigid with exhaustion before Lake Barkely.

Our path paralleled Lake Barkely for a long time. At one point, we spotted a school of turtles floating around, one of them a mere babe. There was also a bigass fish lying dead on the shore...it must have been 2-3 feet long.

The problem with coming close to the Lake was the upsurge in mosquitos. Jennifer and I are only moderately yummy to such pests, but Gena is a human hemoglobic smorgasbord. We sprayed ourselves down with Off!, a spray that is supposed to hide the human scent and it worked...sort of. I still incured two bites on my left hand and two bites on my left lower ribcage. At one point, I spotted mosquitos on both Jennifer and Gena's faces and slapped them off. We joked that I made the trip with two women and ended up slapping them both before the end. I managed to get to Jennifer's pest before it tasted her, but Gena still had a mark later on.

Rubicon

We were already getting tired when we reached a crossroads. That was a decision point, because there was a "cut-through" in which one could essentially truncate the trail and call it quits. If we had taken that trail, our hike would have ended at around five miles. The other option would be to push onward, but the next "cut-through would be six miles up the trail, or basically 150% further than we had already traveled. But Jennifer put it best when she observed that a five-mile hike was a little "wimpy." Plus we didn't travel 200 miles of road to wimp out at only one third of the way up our trail. We chose to aim for the 10-mile point, figuring that the way we were feeling, 14 miles would just be more than we could handle. At that point, we had crossed the point of no return; it was 10 miles or bust.

The Field of Bloodsucking Bastards

Our new route took us through a rarely-used portion of the trail that was heavily overgrown with weeds. We had been waiting for just that kind of congo, as my father had warned us unceasingly about seed ticks in the region. Well, we learned that seed ticks weren't a problem this time of year, but their progenitors certainly were. At about the halfway point, I looked down and found a tick crawling up the front of my leg. I plucked it from my pants and flicked it to wherever-the-hell and hurriedly moved forward. We all did a quick "tick check" on the other side without any problems. I hate parasites. Some forms of life are not sacred and should be exterminated to the last specimen. Extinction is too good for them.

Bloody Mangled Stumps and the Pizza They Craved

As the hike aged, our feet became increasingly sore. The pain moved up our bodies, until eventually, we were sore in our shins, calves, thighs and low backs. Then the pattern repeated itself, except that this time, it was numbness. Eventually, I got to where I could feel my legs moving and the pressure of the ground under them, but not much else.

The hike stopped being about getting to the next goal point and narrowed down to just getting a foot in front of the next foot. One more piece of ground, another set of roots, get to that bend, now take a deep breath. It was very meditative in that the further we went, the less we talked and the more into our own worlds we withdrew.

A physically and spiritually depleted Gena contemplates the blessed peace of non-being.

Granted, those worlds were characterized by suffering, but the mental change was definitely palpable...and strengthening. Stopping for water became a blessed mercy and the dry jerky we had to eat was the nectar of the gods. I developed a pounding headache, probably due to dehydration; it was interesting that none of us needed a "nature break" ourselves any time during the five hours the hike required. It was probably excessive sweating and panting that used all of our water. That, or the image of the person who did need the other variation earlier acted as a deterrent.

Before we even started for LBL, we had decided that after the hike, we would reward ourselves with a Pizza Hut pizza afterward. As we expected, the longer we hiked, the more delicious the thought of that pizza became. In fact, it became a source of inspiration and distraction at one point, as we started discussing what toppings we wanted, the type of crust, how many pies, what size and so on. Imaginging it helped us to avoid thinking about our blistered, sweating, flattened feet that felt like we had stuffed them into 10 oz soda bottles. We also started discussing different mixed drinks, how they smelled, how they tasted, what names the drinks had. The world was smaller by that point, and simpler.

Breakthrough--We Came, We Saw, We Conquered

I took the lead on the last 2-3 miles of the hike and I moved as quickly as my battered body would let me. Although we knew abstractly that we were looking foward to the end, none of us were really aiming for it any more. No, we just wanted to keep our legs churning, our lungs working, or feet moving forward. Suddenly, quite without warning, the woods ended and we found ourselves looking at the opposite side of the station where we had begun. It was over!! We had completed a 10.1 mile-circuit of tortured, undulating wilderness trail around Lake Barkely and emerged with our sanity and good humor intact. In spite of the things we suffered, we were jubilant. There is just something about pitting oneself against physical strain, deprivation and inconvenience and emerging victorious.

Never did a car look so beautiful. After visiting the blessedly civilized restroom of the station, we got in, turned on the air and went back to Cadiz. Our primary reason for coming to LBL had been fulfilled.

A victorious trio of hikers spit on the pathetic challenge of Lake Barkely.

As an epilogue to the hike, we found when we got back to our rooms in Cadiz that they did not, in fact, have a Pizza Hut. :-/ Our motel was close to KFC, but we had imagined that damn pizza too long to change our minds now. So Jennifer and I made an executive decision to see if any of their local "mom and pop" joints would deliver. As luck would have it, they did. I called and placed an order for two. Somehow, the moron on the phone kept calling me "ma'am;" I realize my voice is not the deepest in the world, but I'd have to be Bea Arthur with strep to be mistaken for a woman for as long as this guy did. I even experimented with lowering my voice a couple of octaves, but Mr. Genius still couldn't figure it out. Eventually, since I was using Jennifer's credit card to pay, I just gave in and let him think I was her. The pizzas were delish.

We were so exhausted that night that we all powered down quickly. Gena was having sinus problems to the point that she couldn't breathe very well so we decided to spare her further energy by going ahead and returning to our room. Once there, we collapsed into bed. That was the first time in probably five years that Jennifer and I were in bed so early on a Saturday night.

Sunday, May 22, 2005--The Long Trip Home

The next day, we packed the car and headed out of Cadiz.

Arrival in Princeton, Kentucky--Thanks for the Memories

I had lobbied to stop in Princeton, Kentucky on our return trip, even though it was out of the way. Why? Because I lived there as a child, having moved away in 1983. I figured so much of it would have changed that nothing would be as I remembered it. It didn't help that since I was only 10 years old, I really didn't have a recollection of information like addresses or basic directions to things like my home growing up or the school I attended. So we confined ourselves to the part of the city that had the other reason I wanted to go there...

Taco John's, the Grease Pit that Hillbillies Crave

The other reason is that Princeton has one of the last great phenomena in this country; a Taco John's restaurant. Those of us from smaller places remember it well, as it was of about the same caliber as Taco Tico (later Tacos Too) in Morehead. Basically, it's a no-name grease pit with fond, nostalgic connections. I ate at that very place as a child, and at a similar franchise later as a teenager in Eastern Kentucky. We found it, partially due to a ripple in the Force, which I suspect was due to ancient memories I had of the layout of the town. Once there, I ordered the same thing I always ordered 18 years ago when my parents used to take us to the one in Ashland, Kentucky...two hard-shell tacos and an order of nachos with cheese. It was Gena's first time, Jennifer having been forced to humor me at one in Athens, Ohio before. Gena said afterward that she could just feel the grease moving through her system. That was a beautiful moment. We completed the trip home in decent time, though we did stop at several McDonald's and the traffic was worse. I, of course, wanted to go on our to Hamburg Pavilian for coffee, but that is another story....

Hikes are worth it. Go on one. :)

Ye Ende

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