Roadtrip: Louisville, Kentucky

I'm trying real hard to get through all our roadtrip before the holidays are upon us. I know it must be boring for everyone who did not actually participate in this roadtrip themselves, but I want to record everything before we forget. So onward ho!

After rolling into Kentucky's largest city on the evening of Wednesday, July 6th, we checked into the Hampton Inn in downtown Louisville and decided to spend the last remaining hour(s) of daylight exploring the area a little bit. We walked a few blocks down to the Louisville Waterfront Park.

There were lots of kids playing in the water fountain/pool and trying to keep cool. Have I mentioned that it's really hot in the South during the summer?

There were several statues throughout the park and lots of benches and grassy areas.

From the park, we could see across the Ohio River to Indiana. Louisville (pronounced LOOey-vil or LOOuh-vuhl or LU-vul but NOT LEWIS-ville) is called the "Gateway to the South" because it sits right at the intersection between the Southern states and the Midwestern states and adopts some of the trademarks of both cultures.

It's also a big transportation hub. One of the many sights to see along the river is the Belle of Louisville, an early 20th-century steamboat which now makes evening dinner cruises down the Ohio. We ate dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory and then went to our hotel to finally get some sleep.

In the morning, we had to fight a large group of teenage Bible Campers for waffles at the hotel dining room. We had a lot to accomplish that morning and we didn't need delays. Our first stop was to visit the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, where they produce the wooden bats used by Major League Baseball teams.

We opted not to go on a tour of the factory (time constraints). It would have been interesting to see, but we were there for one thing only: a customized baseball bat for my dad's birthday. You can choose between any number of the bats they produce and have them engraved. We got a regular MLB wooden baseball bat which I had engraved with my dad's name. I won like a thousand daughter points for that gift. My father loves his bat. (My dad is notoriously difficult to shop for so I will probably never top this gift-giving achievement ever again.)


David decided that he also wanted a bat for himself. This surprised me since he's not a big fan of sports or the MLB, but it made sense when he requested "Boyfriend Buster" as his bat's engraved message.

Planning ahead for Zara's future and those unlucky boys who try to date her.

After our bats were finished, we walked back to our hotel, but took a little bit more of a scenic route and I had a chance to admire Louisville's beautiful architecture. I had no idea, but Louisville has the third largest National Preservation District in the country and the largest Victorian district in the United States. There are some truly beautiful buildings in downtown Louisville.

There's also a lot of random art work and sculptures on the street too. This car apparently had something to do with slavery but I didn't stop to read the plaque.


I never did figure out why this building at giant red penguins sitting atop its roof and stringcourse.

We admired the courthouse and other public buildings and churches along our way....

....and the many different statues and memorials.

We made it back to the hotel just in time to check out for the day and got loaded into our car to begin our trip westward across Indiana and Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri and her beckoning Gateway Arch.

Roadtrip: Nashville and Kentucky

The morning of July 6th found us in Nashville, Tennessee. After reading about the attractions we could visit in Nashville (The Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Hall of Fame, The Hermitage, or Belle Meade Plantation) we decided to visit Andrew Jackson's house, The Hermitage. If you didn't know that I'd pick the old house of some famous dead person as our one must-see attraction then you seriously don't know me.

We arrived at The Hermitage early in the morning and went through the requisite museum exhibition before heading through the grounds to the mansion house to await our guided tour. Poor tour guides were wearing long-sleeve period costumes and it was already blazing hot.

Oh, this crazy baby face. She's ridiculous. And she looks so different to me, even though this was only four months ago.
The back of the house. Andrew Jackson bought the home in 1804 from its original owner, Nathaniel Hays. Jackson spent little time at his home until 1837, when he retired from public life.

Andrew Jackson died there on June 8, 1845. After his daughter-in-law's death in 1887, the house was given over to the custodianship of the Ladies' Hermitage Society who still operate the house today.

After taking our tour, we walked through the gardens which were quite beautiful.
There were several other buildings on the grounds and the grounds themselves were quite extensive. We would have liked to have seen more but it was so hot and humid that we couldn't stand being outside any longer.

So we high-tailed it back to the museum gift shop where I bought my obligatory Christmas ornament (we buy a Christmas ornament from every place we visit) and decided to hit the road again since our time was already short and we had a whole state to drive through.

We took the I-65 out of Nashville, heading toward Louisville, Kentucky. I wanted to stop at Mammoth Cave National Park on our way. Ruby Falls had been a nice warm-up to the supposedly massive caves in Kentucky and I was looking forward to seeing what the park had to offer. (My original plan for our trip out to Georgia had also included a stop at the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico which we scrapped in order to see all our friends in Texas so I was anxious that we should get to see some good, big caves now!)

I had read on the NPS website that during the peak summer months, the park offered free self-guided tours of the most easily accessible part of the cave system. We arrived at around 2:15pm (I think), only to discover that the last "self-guided" tour departed at 2pm. There was an option to take a longer, guided tour, but that would have set us back a lot of time so we opted to just continue on with our journey. No caves for us. I did, however, get a stamp in my NPS National Passbook so there's that.

In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that we didn't stick around Mammoth Caves for a tour. They were doing a lot of construction on the I-65 and traffic was way backed up. We eventually got off the interstate, and took a bunch of side streets through the Kentucky countryside until we had by-passed the road construction. I don't know if it really saved us a lot of time, but I liked to think that it did. In any case, we got to enjoy a lot of the beautiful Kentucky countryside....and it was beautiful.

We landed in Louisville around dusk and checked into the Downtown Louisville Hampton Inn. We walked around the city a bit (I'll include those pictures in my next post on Louisville) and ate dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory which was located in this absolutely beautiful renovated Victorian factory.

All in all, the Hermitage was not my favorite presidential home. I wouldn't even rank it in the top ten of my favorite historic houses I've been to but it was worth a visit--at least for me--and I'm glad I can check that off my list. Mammoth Caves may have been a bust but Kentucky was not. I enjoyed the beauty of the Bluegrass State. More on that, later.