Monday, June 6, 2011 - Travel Day to Carter Caves State Park, KY

Welcome to the second most poorly, intentionally-designed horse camp we’ve come across in our travels, second only to the worst, Occoneechee State Park in southern Virginia. Besides being expensive (27 dollars after the senior discount, though it is a full hookup, which is very much surplus to requirement for most horse campers), it is a very dumb layout. The "camp" is basically a parking lot, clearcut, then landscaped after the amenities were put in. There’s a lovely bathhouse that still smells of freshcut lumber, so it’s obviously new. Each site is a pull-through with water, electric and sewer, and wide enough for two vehicles. They’ve planted a few trees in the narrow medians separating the sites, so maybe in 10 or 20 years there will be some shade here. Meanwhile it’s scorching hot on the asphalt and gravel surfaces which make up the bulk of the campground. Across from the sites is a series of strange highline cables, short stretches with rings that don’t give the opportunity to allow the horses to move at all. Then there is a series of planks stretching from one end of the highline to the other, like a fence, or maybe they’re supposed to be a hitching post or something, but the end result is that a horse on a highline has to hang his head over the board as if he were standing in a stall, without the stall around him. Very weird. The worst part is that the footing at the highline is gravel, something no self-respecting horse owner would ever make his horse stand on for hours at a time, much less overnight. So all of the advantages of a highline are destroyed, as the horse can’t lay down, can’t turn around, can’t roll, can’t do any natural horse stuff at all, which is what is usually nice about a highline! Well, needless to say, we weren’t about to make our horses suffer like that, so we instead strung our own highline along the perimeter of the campground, which was all forest. Along the edge was some high grass, so the horses were happy munching fresh greens for a while. We had to roll out the long hose to fill their buckets, but we soon had them settled in. It was so hot again that the first thing we did was get the electric hooked up and the A/C going in order to get the RV cooled down. It wasn’t long before we were all set up, satellite dish and all, and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon and evening. There is one other site being used at the other end of the campground, by a group with at least four Paso Finos, who went out for a ride just before sunset. We figure there must be a good sunset point for folks to be going out at that time of the evening, or else they went because it had been too hot during the day and waited for it to cool down. Whatever, we’re planning on riding tomorrow, hoping that the shade of the woods will be cooler, and to getting out earlier in the day than is our habit (but not holding our breath :-)... It may be an ugly campground, but we’re holding out hope that the trails and the park are nicer.