Kentucky Wildcats

I reminisce back to a couple years I spent in Kentucky. Kentucky is most famous for Daniel Boone and Kentucky Wildcat basketball.  I'm thinking of this because the news has mentioned that this is the Kentucky coach's (John Calipari) worst team since he has been there. The first year I was there was bad - at least bad by Kentucky basketball standards. They won the national championship the year before I was there. The first year I was there was a tough one. They missed the March Madness tournament. It takes 64 teams, so if you can't make it in the top 64, your not all that great. They were accepted into the NIT which used to be a big deal, but now isn't. Kentucky was eliminated in the first round there. The next year I went to a Kentucky game. They were back to being really good that year. They beat up on Mississippi State that night.

I think about their team also because I had a "University of Kentucky" sticker on the back window of Neon, my dearly departed car. I thought about taking it off so I could put it on whatever my new car would be. But I decided I would leave it on Neo. Its kind of like when Jackie Kennedy took off her wedding ring and put in in John Kennedy's casket.

OK, its nothing like that. Very bad analogy. On to Daniel Boone. I've watched every episode of "Daniel Boone" starring Fess Parker. Not to be confused, but often is, with the "Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier" movie which also starred Fess Parker. For a man of action, there was an awful lot of unnecessary talking on the show, but I liked it anyway.

You can see a lot of Daniel sites in Kentucky and a few other places. There are some nice paintings of him in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Of course there is the Alamo in Texas. There is his birthplace. Its in North Carolina and I don't think they know exactly where it is. Again not to be confused with Davy's birthplace, which still exists:

    Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee (Its flat),
    Greenest state in the land of the free (It was a slave state),
    Lived in the woods so he knew every tree (Come on),
    Killed him a bear when he was only three (The bear was three)

Cumberland Gap is really cool. You can hike through the gap and can also hike just off it to where Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia converge. There are a couple of other places that he lived that you can visit, but they aren't very impressive.

I don't know if it makes sense, but I miss Kentucky sometimes. I have no desire to live there again, but I do miss it.