Kentucky has always been a cool place. It's famous for more than Race horses and booze. It has a fabulous cave system which is so big they call it Mammoth Cave. You have to see it to believe it. It takes all day. The temperature inside is 56 degrees F year around. How's that for cool? It's surrounded by rivers on three sides. The Mississippi on the west, the Ohio on the north and the Big Sandy on the east. No wonder they need a navy.

It has an interesting history. No Indian tribes lived there. They reserved Kentucky for hunting and fighting. Well to be strictly accurate, only part of it was reserved. There were early mound builders living in the western end of the state thousands of years ago. You can still see them at Ancient Buried City.

Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River in western Kentucky backs a lake up all the way across Tennessee. If you think Hoover Dam is impressive, you need to look at Kentucky Dam.

Kentucky was the home of lots of famous Americans beside me. There was Henry Clay, Cassius Clay, Fred Vinson, Abe Lincoln, Albin Barkley, Happy Chandler, Adolph Rupp, Darrell Waltrip, and you could even include Daniel Boone who spent a lot of time there.

They have a natural bridge in Natural Bridge State Park, which is a good place for it. They even have the Jefferson Davis Memorial, which looks like a smaller version of the Washington Monument. It isn't very far from Lincoln's birthplace. I think there is some irony in there somewhere.

The town of Middlesboro is located at the very edge of the state. Don't ask me, I don't explain 'em. And Frankfort, the capital city, is a fairly small town, about the size of Carson City, Nevada.

The eastern part of the state is mountainous with elevations running into the thousands of feet. The middle part is the rolling hills of Bluegrass, which is really green. And the western part is flat like a flood plain, which is what much of it is. Kentucky escaped the continental glaciers of the ice age which didn't go further south than the Ohio River, but when the ice melted, super rivers flooded large areas of the state. Floods are part of Kentucky's more recent history. Historically, Kentucky was a forest, but much has been cleared for crops and grazing.
Howard