White Squirrel
Everyone likes holidays, and for me this means an extra day of travel! My good friend and I started a few days before a holiday weekend planning a trip to Louisville. As we were trying to find things to do in Louisville other than the top 3: Churchill Downs, Louisville Slugger and Muhammad Ali, we came across Mammoth Cave. I’ve known about Mammoth for a long time and still do not know why I’ve never been but nonetheless we wanted to go! One word to describe myself and my travels is spontaneous. I think it makes for a better experience when things fall into place and create one-of-a-kind moments that are not planned. With that being said, we started looking into a cave maybe 5 days before. After hours of research on the tour we wanted to do, we tried booking it. We were so excited and already looking at what gear to bring. As when go into the booking website and enter our date that we want we were devastated. The tour we wanted, the Wild Cave Tour, was completely booked for several months! Of course, we were extremely mad, but we still made this trip one for the books. Louisville is a fabulous city full of life and a good restaurant scene. We didn’t let this road block stop us from experience what Mammoth has to offer. We immediately started looking at the next availabilities and building our trip around those dates. We found a date with only 2 open spots available that was around 6 weeks out. We could not book this fast enough. The date was on a Sunday. We decided to do a short Nashville get-a-away on Friday and Saturday and then make the short drive up to Mammoth Sunday morning. Country music, soul food and a few beers, what more could you want out of this city but that will be another conversation. As we fast forward to Sunday, we woke up early to make our 10:00 am tour. We decided to book the Wild Cave Tour. This tour is 6 hours long and introduces you to basic to intermediate spelunking techniques and situations. When we arrived, they gave us a safety briefing and then we headed to the locker rooms to grab our coveralls, helmets, lights and bags. More than half of the tour is crawling on your hands, knees, stomach and back through the mud, dirty and water. There were some tight squeezes, high drops, waterfalls, twist and turns that we had to navigate. Words really cannot describe how great this experience was. With that being said, it really kicked out butt. We had a big breakfast but an extremely small lunch and by the end of the tour, we were running on fumes. Once we cleaned our gear and reached our car, we immediately started looking for restaurants. This was one of those feelings where we wanted a good beer to reward our strenuous efforts. A little over 30 minutes from the park, we found a highly rated restaurant/brewery in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It was called White Squirrel Brewery. As we read over their menu of Chicken and Waffles, Wings, Burgers and Pizza, we immediately put it in the GPS and could not drive fast enough there. Once there and inside, this was a small microbrewery and truly local restaurant. They had a gorgeous patio with nearly the same number of seats as on the inside. Once we sat down and glanced over the beer menu, it shouted simplicity. They had other bottled beers but why would I choose that over a local draft beer. There were 5 beers on tap, one for any taste nearly. The Brown Ale caught my eye. After a day of strenuous activities, I felt like I could eat everything on the menu. It was an extremely tough decision because there were at least 6 different entrees that I was looking at and our waiter was not of any help. He keeps raving on how good the Salmon and Smoke Wings were, 2 things which I find extremely hard to pass up. The plate I chose is something that if it is done right, then it is probably the top 5 dishes I like to eat. The Chorizo Burger and fries. A nice mixture of spicy Mexican sausage and ground beef topped with jalapeno mayo, pepper jack, pickled jalapenos and yup you guess it a fried egg all on top of an English muffin. I love a crispy, thicker cut house fry and am so skeptical about ordering them at restaurants because there are so many restaurants that use frozen fries that are bland. Don’t get me wrong, there are some frozen fries that some chefs are able to cook and season them up and they turn out phenomenal, but I do not like getting my hopes up. I believe that even the best burgers can be ruined by bad fries. Even with this fear in the back of my head, I could not turn down the Chorizo Burger especially with an egg, OverMedium of course, on top! The food came quickly. The fries, excellent! Perfectly seasoned and crispy. The burger, not enough words to describe how good it was. The meat was juicy, the cheese was melted, the double dose of peppers gave it an extra notch of spice and finally…the egg. 5 out of 5 egg review. The creaminess of the yolk toned down the spice when needed but complimented it at the same time. A perfect post spelunking meal!