First Stop, Elizabethtown, Kentucky

Not a lot of space left over after packing the truck!
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Packing the car for this trip reminded me of packing our old sailboat – you have this huge pile of “stuff” that has to be stowed in a real tiny space. But after condensing and compressing, and packing things inside of other things, I was finally ready to depart at 9 am. The good thing was avoiding the local morning rush hour traffic, the bad thing was that I’d probably hit someone else’s evening rush hour traffic.

This first leg of the Big Drive was a long 670 miles/1075 km, ending in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.  Elizabethtown is a town of 24000, and serves as the county seat of Hardin County, Kentucky.  Moreover, it is the Elizabethtown of "Elizabethtown" the movie. Who knew?  http://www.elizabethtown.com/home.html

Wi-Fi in a campground?

Home Sweet Cabin, at least for one night.
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Driving across Maryland, I drove the entire length of one of my favorite interstates, I-68.  Only 112 miles long, I-68 provides beautiful vistas at almost every turn.  At a place called Sideling Hill is a one-of-a-kind "roadcut museum"  to celebrate and explain the geology of the deep roadcut that makes this spot much visited by geologists and students and curious travelers.  I have visited the exhibit center twice myself.  A pedestrian walkway bridge crosses I-68 for better access to the cut, along with a picnic area. For the geologists among you, here is some information on Sideling's geology. http://www.mgs.md.gov/esic/brochures/sideling.html

At our fuel stop in Allegany County, a sign proclaims a local injustice before a stunning mountain view.
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Hey, I like Ike! That’s right, the late President Eisenhower, who dragged the nation into the Interstate Highway era. Once I got on I-95, I didn’t hit another traffic light until Kentucky, only three miles from today’s destination. I traveled all of these Interstates just today: 95, 695, 70, 68, 79, 77.

My innkeeper at Elizabethtown Crossing Campground warned me it's a "dry" county.  I cannot imagine, in a state so famous for its bourbon, that there would be anywhere dry, but there you have it, right here in E-town.

Sheba hasn't exactly taken to being "walked." but at least she tried it once.
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The innkeepers checked me in "late;" they said they usually just leave an envelope in a special box for latecomers but they were  worried about my driving so far. They showed me my cute little cabin with a double bed and a set of bunks.

One of my reasons for selecting this particular place was that they offered free wifi. [Yes, in a campground! Amazing, no?] Well, I got unpacked, and the dog and cat fed; then set up my laptop, intending to update the blog. Login ID? Password? I didn’t have a clue. They had forgotten to tell me, but by then it was quite late.

Birdseye view of the Sideling Hill roadcut. [This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.]
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My neighbors in the cabin next door were sitting on their porch, so I popped out to ask them if the manager had given them the password for the wifi. “What’s a wifi?” asked the woman. “The internet,” I replied, thinking to make the explanation easy on her. “Oh, I don’t know anything about that,” she said. (Oh, really?)

I glanced at my quite un-Toto-like yellow lab, tempted to note "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore." But I might be crossing Kansas later this summer, so I didn't want to jinx my trip there.  No wifi, no blog.  And so it goes.