MAMMOTH CAVE – Those seeking driving directions to Mammoth Cave National Park from the “information superhighway” are routed to a narrow gravel road that leads to the home of Bobby R. Salings.

“Three years ago when this started I used to tell them, ‘You’re lost, you’re looking for Mammoth Cave and you got your directions from the Internet,’ ” Salings said. “They’d say, ‘How did you know that?’ and I’d tell them, ‘Cause it happens every day.’ “

After three years of getting caravans of cars – even recreational vehicles – driving about a mile down his dirt road, Salings said it is getting a little hard to keep his sense of humor about the situation.

And the people misdirected to his home are not often happy to learn that, depending on the status of a local ferry, they have 25 to 50 miles to go before they get to the park. On top of that, the trip is often back over the same path they took to visit him.

Salings said he and his daughter made a sign and put it at the end of the road, telling visitors that his is not the road to the national park.

But that doesn’t always help.

“I’ve had seven cars in a row driving down here,” Salings said. “My neighbor has sent away 30-some at the turn in one day.”

He said it was his son, who unlike him has a computer and Internet connection, who has been trying to get the problem corrected with MapQuest, and he has even enlisted the help of officials at the park.

Vickie Carson, the public information officer for Mammoth Cave National Park, said she and others at the park have been trying for three years to get the problems fixed.

“They said the problem was that we don’t have a street address,” Carson said. “The reason the directions take people to his house is Mr. Salings’ house is at the center of the 42259 Zip code.”

She said a work-around for MapQuest, giving the visitors center a street address, does work if the person searching knows that address.

Other map services have worked it out without that street address.

Local driving directions from the Google Maps service won’t take visitors all the way to Salings’ door. That service’s directions stop very near the entrance to Nolin Lake State Park.

Staff at that park are used to directing lost vacationers to Mammoth Cave.

“Yeah, I usually send them to the cave by the Houchins Ferry,” said Sherlene Elmore at the registration center at Nolin State Park. “But with that closed, they have to drive all the way around through Brownsville.”

Yahoo’s driving directions were also sending people to Salings’ house, but now, not only does Yahoo give directions directly to the visitor’s center at Mammoth Cave, it does it with the shortest route of any.

If you know how to make it work, the MapQuest service will direct you to the same place, though the route will be a little longer. If you enter 1 Mammoth Cave Parkway as the street address, then MapQuest will provide directions to the visitor’s center.

Carson said the directions problem have lead to some funny and not-so-funny results.

A local hotel clerk told Carson that one of their guests showed up soaked to the knees on a rainless night. The woman told the desk clerk that she’d gotten out of her car when she realized she was lost and stepped right into a pond.

Another time, Carson said, the faulty directions resulted in a school bus full of special needs children on the ramp to the ferry. The driver didn’t drive into the river, but there was another problem,

She said the ferry isn’t large enough to carry a bus, but when the driver started to turn around, the vehicle became stuck and a tow truck had to be called.

The problem is one she said the National Park Service is aware of and trying to correct. With two of three systems now giving the proper directions with just the words Mammoth Cave and Kentucky entered, the situation has improved, she said.

Salings meanwhile is still uncomfortable with the amount of traffic directed to his home, but confusion is something that has dogged his steps since birth.

“I was supposed to be Robert Salings,” he said. “But they got it wrong on my birth certificate.”

Instead, Bobby Robert Salings has been the name he’s carried for more than 70 years.

He is hoping the present problem will be solved a little quicker.