My New Year’s Resolution is to take a road trip a month. The requirements are solely that I go out and see something, do something; it doesn’t need to be far from home, but to reach my goal of seeing EVERYTHING it means I need to actually DO it. And I want to get back to blogging about it and sharing my experiences and pictures with those who care to see it, so thanks for reading. It’s hard with teaching, tutoring, church, and just life in general, but my dream is to travel the world and I love writing about it, so no time like the present. I’m a few months behind, but as I look out the window and enjoy the sunshine and warmer weather that spring is bringing, I can think back to the colder weather of January and write about the road trip that my friends and I took to Louisville. I had been planning on visiting alone but my awesome friends Erin and Heidi decided to join along, and I loved the company.
One of my travel objectives was to complete my bourbon trail, which I had started awhile ago. If you didn’t read that post and are interested in the bourbon trail, I wrote three posts about it shortly after having spent a weekend traveling around Kentucky in April 2015, check it out.
Our trip began on a Saturday afternoon of a long weekend, and we headed directly to the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience.
When I first started the Bourbon Trail, I didn’t know what to expect. I wouldn’t say that I was super excited about it, doing it more because I knew my friend Justin would like it. I definitely was skeptical about seeing so many distilleries, thinking they would offer the same thing; but my favorite part of the whole bourbon trail is that each distillery is so distinctly different and offers things that the others don’t. It was $12 to visit the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, which includes a guided tour and a tasting of three different bourbons. This tour focused on the history of the distillery, started with a short video and then taking you on a walk through time, visiting a mock-up Louisville wharf in the last 1700s with a recreation of the Whisky Row in downtown Louisville, and continuing to a Main Street of the 1890s, where the tasting room is located. You also get the pretty-standard look at the bourbon still and at the vats of bourbon being made and distilled there. We got there just in time for their last tour of the day, at 6pm, and it did not disappoint.
That night we stayed in our lovely home for the weekend, rented through AirBnB, and on day two, Sunday, we decided to check out the Louisville Slugger Museum.
This museum has baseball artifacts and attractions, including the world’s largest baseball bat.
They also have a signature wall, displaying the signatures of all the players that have contracts with the bat maker and a vault holding replicas of some of the players bats.
There was a lot of history, and mannequins of some of baseball’s most famous players; I couldn’t pass up the chance to pose with some of the greatest.
I am admittedly not the biggest sports fan, I’d rather curl up and read a good book, but this was a pretty cool spot. We also got to do a factory tour where they actually make the baseball bats that are used by current baseball players. No pictures were allowed, but I did get my very own mini-bat! And I learned a lot; I had no idea about all the steps it takes to make the bats that were and are still used by some of the greatest athletes, included the Babe!
After our tour of the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory we headed to my last stop of the Bourbon Trail! The Bulleit Distillery at the former Stitzel-Weller distillery.
This is a newer distillery, and a pretty basic tour at $10 a piece; not the best tour I’ve had, but informative and to-the-point. We were taken on a guided tour, with information about the site where Bulleit bourbon is now being distilled, a trip into the store house (love the smell in there!) and then off to the tasting room.
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| Chilling at the desk of Mr. Bulleit |
That evening, we went back into downtown Louisville for dinner and just happened to walk by Museum Hotel.
From the window you could glimpse all kinds of interesting artwork, and we were walking and glancing at it all slowly enough that the doorman opened up the door and invited us in to take a look. It was so fascinating! There was all kinds of interesting artwork in the lobby and open areas. We especially loved the interactive wall of poetry.
I love this part of road trips, where you just accidentally stumble into someplace wonderful that you weren’t expecting. It’s why I don’t love to have things too planned out when I’m traveling. And it was a great find, and especially nice since it was right across the street from our dinner spot, The Mussel & Burger Bar. It was soooo yummy, and I especially loved our server who hooked me up with all the yummy condiments for my delicious fries. My mouth is watering just thinking of it.
Our last stop of the weekend was the Muhammad Ali museum. We were there on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which seemed especially appropriate, considering all the things those two men did for the rights of the African American community. There seemed to be a theme of our weekend: overcoming oppression and adversity. This could be true even with the distilleries, those companies had to survive prohibition in order to remain in business. And just the evening before we had watched the amazing film “Hidden Figures” about what some African American women of NASA did and endured to help the American space program. The history of America definitely has some low points, hopefully that we have learned from so that we won’t commit the same mistakes of the past. It was incredible learning so much about Ali and all that he went through, all that he fought for: refusing to fight in a war that he didn’t believe in, standing up for himself in a time when he wasn’t considered “equal” to others because of his skin color and proving that he could overcome those things and become even better. What an incredible show of strength he had! Definitely an amazing museum to check out!
What an amazing weekend in Louisville, just a short three and a half hours drive, and three days of fun with my girls! I recommend it and I hope to be back soon, there’s a lot more I want to check out, but I am happy to say the Bourbon Trail is complete! Until next time!
