Travelin’ Thornberries Do What Floats Their Boat in Lake Cumberland

 May 13 to May 16, 2013

           Salvete, Mi Amici!  Times and circumstances being what they are, the Travelin' Thornberries have been far less prodigious in their excursions these past several years.  Nevertheless, we haven't been completely inactive, and this year, we are sharing our small, thematic experience with you.  We took a cabin trip to Lake Cumberland, Kentucky.  Yes, we've been forced to adapt to so many new changes--both welcome and unwelcome--that once again, we weren't feeling favorably disposed toward dealing with the public.  Ergo, we planned a more contemplative retreat to better serve our abraded sensibilities.  My plans this year were to read a couple of nonfiction books about language and government, and Jennifer wanted to delve into books about higher education.  Where better than in a venue that sits closer to wind and wave?  Behold, our  four themes:

The Trip--Sucky as Usual

            And there's not much more to say than that.  The Travelin' Thornberries always have bad luck when it comes to road trips.  This one was no different.  It took longer than necessary because of a combination of highway construction and weird-ass street name changes that everyone in the state but us seems to already know about.  Even with a combination of GPS and printed directions, we got lost.  Luckily, Jennifer was able to call the cabin rental place, and they set us straight enough that we finally got there well into the third hour of our 2.5-hour drive.  The homemade spaghetti and sausage dinner we crafted later helped offset the frazz.  :)

The Cabin—A Review

            We've stayed in hotels and motels around the country.  Some, like the Drury Inn, were quaint, supportive little places, with receptive staff and lots of free little perks.  Others, like the New York-New York, in Las Vegas, were sprawling Sin Cathedrals, comfortable but frustrating to navigate, with a "pecked to death" tendency to require tips for any little service.  And finally, there's the example of the Milner in Boston, an atrocious sweat box hell-hole, so far beneath the price of admission in quality that the only way to renovate it would be to burn it down to the sidewalk and then sow salt over top of the ashen ruins. 

            But this was our first cabin.  On the surface, the concept seems rather silly.  Why pay money to stay somewhere that requires you to bring all your own food and drinks?  How is it a vacation when you have to cook your own meals in the kitchen and then wash all the dishes afterward?  In other words, how was this different from just staying home? 

            Except it is different.  Don't ask me exactly how; I can't entirely explain it.  Maybe the change in venue makes it feel like a new and unique experience, even with all the same chores in tow.  Plus, it is away from the hassles of home, with more unstructured time to be as creatively proactive or vegetatively inactive as one wishes.  Doing cooking and dishes isn't painful when it is freely chosen, alongside someone you care about, in a peaceful setting, with the ambiance of music or educational audio entertainment in the background.

            The cabin was relatively small--only two bedrooms--but that was plenty of space for two people who share a bed.  It had a fully functional kitchen, stove, table, couch, and a gateway to hell, designed to flood the place with gush after gush of fire and damnation, the better to roast the occupants to blackened piles of calcium. 

            Wait, back up, there... 

            The fact is that the place was pretty sweet, and reasonably priced.  More, since tourist season wouldn't really begin for another two weeks, we had the area pretty much to ourselves.  Only one other cabin around us seemed occupied, and naturally, it had to be the loud, lederhosen-clad, drunken yodelers.  But we just closed the shades in that direction and threw open all the rest to flood the place with sunlight, tranquility and serenity.  Exactly what we needed. 

            Light and heat were the only real weaknesses of the venue.  It seems our destiny to find places that want to keep internal illumination to a guttering fifteen candlepower.  Recreational Braille.  At night, the cabin was dim, and I had to swipe a bedroom lamp for the living room just to get enough light by which to read my nonfiction books.  And like that

unfortunately memorable Milner, this place had problems with the climate control.  We stayed swelteringly hot for most of our time there until I pulled out the air conditioning filter and found it so caked with debris that it looked like someone had used it in a crematorium for seven years without a break.  Rather than try to remedy that corpse-laden article, I simply laid it aside, and thereafter, the air inside was cooler, if not completely satisfactory.  Nevertheless, we were content.

The Lake—The Travelin' Thornberries, Aboard the S.S. Minnow

            Jennifer has some familiarity with Lake Cumberland, as her father lived there for many years, and she'd been exposed to water-based recreation by boat.  She was highly excited this time to rent a boat ourselves and take it out on the lake for a half-day of getaway time.  Our cabin was within walking distance of the rental facilities, so it didn't take us long to todder down the mountainside and find ourselves a boat manager.  This lady was no-nonsense, typically managerial, but she laid out everything we needed to do to navigate the craft, including how to use the emergency radio if we got into a jam.  Apparently, it is always on, and she has a standing channel on it.  No sweat. 

            Jennifer tooled us out of the marina area, observing the "no wake" laws around the large houseboats docked nearby, and then pushed the throttle to full on our li'l S.S. Minnow!  For several hours, we pushed up and down Lake Cumberland, enjoying the sunshine and the fact that there wasn't another human being for what looked like miles.  We had to adjust to the fact that we couldn't just stop anywhere.  Our craft lacked an anchor, so if we cut the engine, the currents pushed us either out into the middle of nowhere, or (more likely) into the shoreline.  Neither of us was exactly sure how the boat would react to being too close to shore.   

 

Jennifer pours the coal to our little S.S. Minnow, and pushes us around Lake Cumberland.

  Our manager had explained that it was possible to beach the boat deliberately for a land excursion, but we didn't fancy the chances of screwing up the boat's rotors and ending up marooned out there.  Instead, Jennifer just deactivated the engines at a decent distance from any land, and we ate our quaint little sandwich lunch while drifting about.  We took

pictures.  I used my binoculars, now that I was in a place where I felt I could pull them out without someone shooting me in my pudgy gut for spying.  Eventually, while Jennifer puttered us thither and yon, watching the scenery, I pulled out a book I'd started by Charles Goodsell, A Case for Bureaucracy.  It's a book that takes a favorable view of government services, but that's beyond the scope of this review.  :) 

            Did you catch that we're referring to our boat as the S.S. Minnow?  If you know your 1960s pop culture, you'll recognize that name and see a bit of foreshadowing here.  That's the name of the ship that carried the seven castaways on ­Gilligan's Island.  

Our boat excursion has thus far been exhilarating and relaxing; what could go wrong?

            Oh, boy.  Now what's going to happen to our intrepid gluttons for punishment?

            Here it comes.  Jennifer was guiding us through the Caney Creek section of the Lake, and I was delightfully enjoying my reading, when suddenly, our boat's engine made a noise like a cat with a ball of steel wool stuck in its throat, and then it skipped above the water slightly.  "What the hell!?" I exclaimed, slamming down my book.  Turns out, because of the recent increase in the lake's water level, there are currently many obstacles out there now submerged, that would have once been easily seen.  And avoided.  But not now.  And Jennifer had ran us over an underwater tree.  At this point, it was little more than a waterlogged…well, log, but one still securely rooted to the bottom of the lake.  Our boat's motor had scraped across it.  Fortunately, we determined we still had engine power, and figured we'd dodged a soggy, wooden bullet. 

            Then Jennifer tried to take us back to the marina.

Thomas reads intently, blithely unaware that disaster is about to strike!

            Yes, that's when she discovered we'd lost attitude control.  The impact had apparently jarred loose something between the wheel and the engine.  The former would now turn 360 degrees without having any influence on the latter at the stern end of our craft.  We could go forward, but not to port or starboard.  In other words, we were adrift in the middle of Lake Cumberland.  I know, only the Travelin' Thornberries, right?  Our one and only boat excursion ever, and disaster strikes. 

            [Sigh]

            Alright, so it was time to put that emergency radio to the test.  Jennifer pulled out the mic and sent out a distress call.

            [Cricket-cricket]  No answer.

            Oka-a-a-y…  Now what?  The water was too cold for us to swim anywhere.  Even if we could, we were only near little spits of land that gave us no bearing on how to find a public highway, let alone phone access. 

            We had one last act of desperation, and that was my cell phone.  I was pretty sure it wouldn't work, since I'd been unable to get a signal even in the more populous marina area.  But to our relief, it connected to the number on the manager's business card.  I called her, explained our situation and she naturally stated she'd "never heard of anything like that."  Of course. 

The Thornberries are trapped somewhere out in this intestinal Lake!

            It turns out our particular location was both our greatest liability and our greatest benefit.  No surprise, Caney Creek seems to be the one part of Lake Cumberland where the radio habitually doesn't work.  Yeah, that figures.  On the other hand, it was also the only part Jennifer knew by name from her father's history of living there, and it was the reason we were in that section.  When you're on the phone, trying to explain to someone where you are on a lake in which pretty much every landmark is "water, more water and a bunch of trees on the shore," it could literally take hours and hours for help to find you.  But Jennifer was able to tell them the name of the only area she recognized and give them a couple of relatively unique landmarks to help track us down.

            So the Bobbing Thornberries settled down to wait for rescue.  I read a little more, and Jennifer sat contemplating the weather, water and scenery.  Finally, after about thirty minutes or so, another craft just like ours showed up, and the pilot yoked us to it.  Then, using both engines and the steering capabilities of the one, he took us back to the marina, where we thankfully plopped our feet safely onto terra firma.  

Yoked securely to another craft, Jennifer and Thomas are hauled back to civilization.

            Despite that one drawback, however, we still felt we'd had a good experience.  And even still, we'd go back out there again.  The prior serenity was worth it.

The Hidden Hiking Trail—WTF!?

            Our other major excursion was a simple hiking trail. 

            Jennifer and I are neither one new to recreational hiking while on vacation.  In May

2000, we joined our friend Paris and endured a 4-mile trip virtually straight up that ended with clawing our way up a mountainside to get a panoramic view of Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains.  Then in May 2005, we subjected ourselves and our friend Gena to the mammoth 10.1-slog through the hellish backwoods of Lake Barkley in Western Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes.

            By contrast, at about four miles, this particular trail was far shorter than the 10.1 of LBL, and much more forgiving in grade than the Mount Olympus we'd climbed in the Smokies.  It seemed like a quaint, cheap way to spend the second day of our trip.  And in fact, it started out as just that.  We gathered lots of pictures of rocks, trees, bugs, sunshine and so on.  At a point of relatively high elevation, we got a stunning view of Lake Cumberland, which we enjoyed while munching a couple of homemade ration bars we'd brought along for just this sort of event. 

A nice view of Lake Barkley from the Lake Bluff Trail.

             Then things started to get hairy. 

            First of all, the trail kept dumping us out onto major highways.  Luckily, at this time of year, they weren't really that busy, but even still, it broke the illusion of taking on rugged nature when every ten minutes we were walking along an asphalt road with a yellow line in the middle of it, listening for approaching traffic. 

            Second, the signs for the trail we were hiking were pretty obscure in places.  Each time we came out on the road and dodged a car or two, we had to walk up and down for a quarter of a mile before we could find where the trail resumed on the other side.  Half the routes we thought were the right ones ended up terminating at "no trespassing" signs on homeowners' private driveways.   The rest went to utility buildings, many of which looked like they hadn't been active since the Nixon Administration. 

            At the very end, despite our best ranging and roving, we lost the trail completely.  Now very irritated, we located a deserted lodge in the middle of nowhere and used the public map they had outside to just navigate our way back to the car by walking alongside the highway.  Maybe that was the way the trail would have went anyway, but we never found out one way or the other.  By that point, we were sweaty, out of drinking water, tired and frustrated.  Again, we're glad we went and gathered so many good pictures…but neither of us thinks we'd do that particular trail again.  At least the brutal trails of our past made it clear when you were on said trails, from beginning to end. 

            And that's the broad themes of our trip!

            We've long come to expect setbacks and hassles when we try to engage with all the details of a good vacation.  That means we've evolved away from believing we'll have a flawless experience.  Our goals now are to enjoy a bit of unstructured time in the pursuit of our proactive hobbies, and to mold the events of our trips into pictures and stories to share with others. 

            How are we doing?  Are you entertained, our Darlings?