Jess and I have scheduled our cross country drive with lots of flex time each day.  We’re only driving a few hundred miles at a time, so that if we see anything cool on the side of the road, we’ve got room in our schedule to pull off and do some exploring.  We woke up yesterday morning in Lexington, KY, and had to get to St. Louis by the evening.  We decided to stop for a little while in Louisville along the way.

Two separate Louisvillians actually recommended the same eatery to us, so the choice was obvious.  We arrived at Lynn’s Paradise Cafe in time for brunch, and we knew immediately that we would love it.  The super-kitschy diner had a gift shop inside and lots of weird art and photo-ops outside, which we enjoyed while waiting for our table.

Once seated, the servings were huge, the food was delicious, and our waitress had purple eyes.  Even at 11:30 on a Wednesday, the place was hopping.  It seemed like a hot tourist destination as well as a local hangout, and I’ve never had a better buttermilk biscuit.

After brunch, it was back on the road.  Driving on I-64 through Indiana, we saw a road sign for Marengo Cave, a US National Landmark.  Annoyed with road construction and slow traffic, it was the perfect place to pull off and be tourists.  It was a bit of a detour (the signs say five minutes off the exit, but it was more like ten or fifteen), but a worthy side trip.

In addition to cave tours, visitors can camp and go canoeing at Marengo Cave.  We just took the $13, 30-minute Crystal Palace tour, which is a short loop through several large rooms at the front of the cave.  The longer Dripstone Trail tour is $14.50 and goes through much more of the cave, but we didn’t have time for that.  I don’t know what we missed by skipping the longer tour, but I felt like we saw a lot on ours.  This was a great way to break up our drive, too, as the caverns are located in the middle of a long stretch of rather boring roadway (and road construction).

All in all, it was a great day for side trips, and I hope we can find some equally exciting roadside attractions today.  Stay tuned…

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 10:48 am and is filed under Attractions, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.