The Not-Dayton Trip, Part Three: Campbellsville, Kentucky to Beckley, West Virginia

 This is the third post in a series; you really should read them in order. 

Here's a link to Part One; and here's a link to all the pictures from this trip

  So at some point this morning I stopped and made a list on my phone of things to mention in this blog post, because I often find that by the time I sit down to write in the evenings I can't remember all the interesting little things I've thought of while driving during the day. When I made this list it was late morning; I didn't add anything to the list after that, so I expect this post will be heavy on the early stuff and pretty light on the after-lunch stuff. Not that it matters, really: when you get right down to it, there's not a lot of interesting stuff for anyone besides me on this trip (so far). 

 I got out of my hotel pretty early this morning. The place where I stayed (Campbellsville, Kentucky, I  think it was) is iust over the line in the Eastern Time Zone, so my internal clock is a little off. I went to bed last night at about 11pm EDT, even though I wasn't really tired, and got up at 6AM EDT because my alarm went off. I shut it off and tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't, so by 7AM EDT I was on the road. The sun wasn't even up at that hour. (The disadvantage of being in the western edge of a time zone.) Traffic was light, though, and by the time I got to the next town it was well up.

 That town was Lebanon, Kentucky, only about 30 miles along, but as I was passing through the downtown area I saw exactly the sort of mom-and-pop cafe I like to patronize, so I stopped for breakfast: the Main Street Diner. Parking was very easy: mine was the only car in the on-street parking area at that time of day. And I was the only patron in the restaurant at 7:40 on a Wednesday morning. I hope the place makes it; it was a pretty pleasant place, with good food and reasonable prices, and excellent coffee. They've only been open since January, and everybody knows how hard it is to make a go of a restaurant. But we need more of this kind, and fewer of the fast-food chain restaurants. (I was going to leave a glowing review on Google Maps, but for once I've found a place before they did; it's not listed yet. I added it, but will probably not remember to post a review when they add it a few days from now.)

Secretariat in the traffic circle, Lexington

 

 This morning was spent cruising through the Bluegrass Country of central Kentucky: geologically, a karst subsurface where the overlying layers of softer rock have eroded away. I stopped in the outskirts of Lexington to get a picture of the statue of Secretariat -- objectively the greatest race horse of the past 100 years, at least -- and there was this exhibit in the scenic overlook there that described the geology of the area. I've probably gotten it wrong but who gives a damn?

  All the way from Lebanon to Lexington I was seeing these dark rock walls lining the road, and I mean for miles and miles and miles, on both sides and in the neutral grounds. They're called double-rock walls because the bottom parts, about three feet tall, are limestone blocks set horizontally without mortar, while the tops are irregular limestone set at an angle. I didn't get a picture of it myself, but there are lots of them on line, including the one at the link above. (Though my experience has been that, a year from now, that link will be broken.) I suspect these walls were slave-built, but then New England is full of fancy stone walls that go on for miles, too, and they didn't use slaves (most of them). Anyway, they're very pretty, these walls, and are a big reason that the entire Bluegrass area was made a historical district.

 Another thing I noticed was that in that part of Kentucky, which is big-time Horse Country, a lot of the bluegrass paddocks, huge areas of grass, were actually mown. That surprised me, to see the lines left by tractor mowers. You'd think they'd just let the horses run out there and keep it cropped. 

 So by the end of the day of very pleasant top-down driving I'd finished touring all the remaining counties of Kentucky -- 41 states down, only 9 to go! -- and slipped into West Virginia. I expected to have to set my clocks back a hundred years but it seems the government has been busy since I moved away, resolutely dragging the state into the 20th Century. I'm spending tonight in Beckley, where I used to live, and other than the roads still being in the same place, everything I've seen so far is new since I left. I didn't expect to feel at all at home here, and I have not been disappointed.