Jon's Journeys

Cave Country RV Campground, Site 16, Cave City, KY

I promise to have something more interesting that campground photos, at least for tomorrow!

Not too much in the way of mileage today - yesterday's stop wasn't all that far from the Mammoth Cave National Park. I'm in a commercial campground tonight since I want to try cooking my first "Personal Pan Pizza" and I need electricity for the toaster oven. Even the 1000 watt inverter can't deal with the 15 amps the Crusinart draws.

Yesterday ended with a mad dash to pack away the chair & fold the awning as a thunderstorm rolled in. It rained heavily for awhile, then off & on all night. Fog & drizzle on the drive to Cave City, but it cleared up nicely by 12:00 (which is now central time).

After setting up the trailer, I drove into the park. I was hoping to get a tour today, but all of the Historic tours, the one I wanted to take, were filled for the day. I made a reservation for tomorrow at 11:00. In a way that's good, because I wanted to stay in the National Park campground. Very pretty, shaded sites. I drove through on my way back from making the reservation for the tour & picked out a site that has a bit of sun (to keep the solar panels happy). The campground is almost empty - a few tents & RVs, but lots of open sites. I guess it is still early...

Anyway, the plan is to head over to the park in the morning (it is about 5 miles to the campground), set up the trailer & head to the tour. After that I'll explore some of the rest of the park.

I did dig out my camera GPS - when attached, it adds the location of the camera to the EXIF data attached to each image. If you have an EXIF viewer, you can see where I stood to photograph today's campground photo (only works with the large version of the image), at least if you look at the image at the LakeshoreImages.com page - Google strips out the EXIF info when images are transferred. Unfortunately, the signal from the satellites doesn't make it underground - no locations for tomorrow's cave photos ! I do have an extra photo for today - there is another fiberglass "egg" in the campground, a Casita a couple of sites down from me.

So, for the rest of the afternoon I'm waiting for the pizza dough to rise, and relaxing with a book. I'll let you know how it worked out.


Well I/m back. I have to say the pizza was OK, but not quite ready for prime time. First off, the dashboard of a warm car makes a great rising oven. In fact, almost too good - the dough was ready before I was. The toaster oven was set at 500°F, the same temperature I use at home in the standard oven. First problem - I use Crisco to keep the pizza from sticking to the pan. Since I didn't have any, I used olive oil. First, it made it very difficult to spread the dough, and second, it stuck!

As to cooking, it is usually done in 10 minutes in the full sized oven - in the toaster oven the top was done, but the dough could have used another 2-3 minutes. Not sure if changing the temperature will improve things; not even sure which way to go - up or down. I guess I'll still have to keep experimenting. By the way, for those interested, it is a vegtarian pizza - onions, mushrooms & peppers with my homemade sweet & sour tomato sauce that I developed for veal cutlet - works well on pizza.

Till Tomorrow!