| Last week my family spent an afternoon in Cave City, Kentucky on the way to visit my in-laws. If you’ve been on that stretch of interstate, you’ve likely almost run off the road after spotting this life-size dinosaur replica right at the exit. |  |
In its heyday, Cave City was full of family fun and quirky roadside attractions: Dinosaur World, Guntown Mountain, haunted houses and mazes, waterslides, putt-putt golf, bumper cars, train rides, etc. Several of those are still in operation, but most of them are not. Bigger and flashier amusement parks like Kentucky Kingdom and Beech Bend have all but sucked the life out of this once-booming tourist area.
I’ve always had a strange attraction to abandoned buildings. I always want to stop and look at abandoned houses, abandoned barns, even abandoned businesses. I can’t help but wonder who left them there just rotting away. Why haven’t they been sold or torn down? What were they like in their day? Who just walked away? So Cave City was some kind of strange and twisted delight for me, replete with abandoned roadside attractions. I just couldn’t resist snapping a few pictures to share with you. This abandoned souvenir store is appropriately named “Off the Beaten Path.”
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This is the old door at a no-longer-used entrance to Onyx Cave. You can still enter the cave through the cave souvenir shop (which we did). |
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Nothing like a little hillbilly golf. The sign is still in pretty good shape, but the actual golf course hasn’t faired as well (as you’ll see below). |
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Yes, that’s a bathtub and toilet right in the middle of TW’s Redneck Golf. Not sure if they were part of the original golf course, but I suppose there’s a “you’re-a-redneck-if” joke in there somewhere.
The discolored rhino and gorilla still guard the parking lot of this abandoned arcade. No one has played Pac-Man here in a long time.
| This roadside teepee built in the 1970′s was probably the backdrop for a lot of snapshots for tourists. Who knew that Native Americans used hollow-core doors? |  |
This souvenir shop/trading post is still in business. There’s just nothing I can say that is clever enough to capture the essence of this photo.
I guess some people are still buying firewood around here, because that truck doesn’t look very old.
The dark skies above these colorful but abandoned shops seem appropriate. I love the kitsch of all of this, but there’s also a melancholic nostalgia about this place that haunts me. It calls to mind childhood family trips to Pigeon Forge before Dollywood and outlet malls. Does anyone else remember Hee-Haw Village?
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I think you can safely say that this haunted house is a whole lot scarier now than when it was in business. |
I cannot understand why any thinking person would abandon one Pizza Hut and build a new one right beside it. Does that make good business sense?
Don’t get me wrong. There are several attractions that are still alive and . . . well, they are at least still alive. Dinosaur World, Guntown Mountain, Kentucky Action Park, Mammoth Cave, various souvenir shops, and fast foods joints are among the businesses that are still in operation. And maybe they will survive another decade if they capitalize on their strengths. Because there are at least a few of us who are willing to pay a few bucks to spend some time in an honest-to-goodness ghost town. And there’s a lot less traffic and shorter lines than in Kentucky Kingdom or Dollywood.
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I’ve been to those places in their hey-day…so sad now.
I would make a special trip to visit Cave City. Reminds me of stops along the way when I was a kid. Not sure my grandkiddos would enjoy it like I did, but who knows. LOL, I would be happy if they always remembered ‘the strange place Oma took us to visit’.
sussi, you sound like my kind of grandma! your grandkids would LOVE it!
Good post. Good photos. Good words.
Thank you.
My family loves traveling to see quirky roadside attractions like these, but mostly we stay on the East Coast. We have a blog,“Go BIG or Go Home,” which chronicles what happens when our small-town family visits the “world’s largest”…whatever!
What no pic’s from the lift? Your blog is going to my spam again, so I just opened this. Missed you last week.
I write a column for Kentucky Monthly magazine called “Kentucky A to Z.” Every month, my editor chooses a town at random and I get 24 hours to travel there and find a story. You would be amazed by the number of similar ghost towns I’ve come across in my travels. Some of these towns are so far gone, people in nearby communities don’t even recognize the name of the town despite the fact that it is still on a Kentucky map. And I’ve noticed several abandoned Pizza Huts with a new location built next door or across the street. It is so wasteful!
“Dinosaur World, Guntown Mountain, Kentucky Action Park, Mammoth Cave, various souvenir shops, and fast foods joints are among the businesses that are still in operation. And maybe they will survive another decade if they capitalize on their strengths.”
I enjoyed this post, but I feel like I had to point something out. You list mammoth cave among all of the other roadside attractions in the area. Mammoth Cave is part of the large Mammoth Cave National Park. The cave itself is the largest known cave system in the world. It is still highly visited every year. It is hardly a tourist trap/roadside attraction like the other places you have listed.
buk,
you are correct, of course. thank you for pointing that out.
Dear Mother Nature, Could you please call someone and have them fix the heater
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