Goodbye to the smokies...on to Kentucky

We were sorry to leave GSMNP which is now one of our favorite places. We ventured north from there to the beautiful "horse capitol of the world" Lexington, Kentucky. We stayed for 2 nights at the Kentuck Horse Park Campground, which was a great deal considering the stay in the CG included discounts and free parking for the Horse Park. If you love horses, you can't miss this, where amongst many other things, are the graves of Man of War, War Admiral, and John Henry. Also, both Funny Cide (Kentucky Derby winner) and Cigar (winningest horse ever at $10M, pictured below) reside.

The 2010 World Equestrian Games will be held here, so they have built a fabulous new outdoor arena, and a huge indoor arena is under construction. When we left Lexington on the way to Indiana, we pulled into Louisville for a brief visit to Churchill Downs.

Unfortunately, out of Kentucky, across Indiana to an overnight stop just west of Indiannapolis (small town of Crawfordsville, IN), we had a flat tire on the 5th wheel, so spent a morning there getting all new tires on the 5th wheel (knew it was due but were hoping to make it through the summer). They didn't tighten the hub caps properly and we lost a hub cap from there on the way up to Iowa (that's just salt in the wound). What followed was a couple more huge expenses - the next day our 23-month old HP laptop dies (Geek squad in Iowa City said it was the mother board) so we had to buy a new laptop), then the day we left Iowa, the truck lost power, we milked it back to the GMC dealer in Iowa City and got a new "fuel injector assembly" ($500) on our truck which barely has 35,000 miles!!! Yikes, it was an expensive few days.