This is a somewhat belated post about a weekend trip A.J. and I took a little while ago… I was procrastinating in adding some of the pictures, which really are important, so enjoy them even more now that you know they were the reason for the delay in this post!
On Match Day (soon after finding out we woould be heading back to Seattle!) A.J. and I set out on a weekend trip to Louisville, KY. "Why Louisville?" you might ask… well, there are many cities within a day’s drive of St. Louis and before moving here we had never been to any of them. When we have long weekends, we like to pick a city and go exploring for a couple of days – we’ve done Atlanta-GA, Springfield-IL, New Orleans-LA, and one time we drove up to Nortre Dame (IN) for a day to see my sister’s last college soccer game. Other cities still on the list – that we may or may not get to – include Memphis, Nashville, Indianaoplis, Cincinnati…
So anyway – we set out on our weekend adventure, which happened to start off kind of rough when I missed the east-bound on-ramp (since I’m so used to taking the freeway west-bound). No worries, though, I’ll just head over to another on-ramp… which I had never used before and so took a wrong turn and missed it as well. Okay, then, we’ll just head a bit over by school because I know there’s an on-ramp there (and A.J. thinks there is too)… except there’s not. So fine, I’ll just head downtown where there HAS to be an on-ramp. And I found one… and finally got on… heading east-bound…. And then it was a nice 5-hour jaunt directly east with a lot of singing with the radio and listening to a SUSPENSE audio story ("The Hitchhiker"). We found our hotel easily (with directions from our GPS Yoda), checked-in, and ordered California Pizza Kitchen for dinner.
We started off the next morning with breakfast at the hotel (included in the room price) where a very happy waitress named Irina took very good care of us. Omlettes, juice, hot tea… and she even tried to get us Belgian waffles, but our full stomachs led us to defer to the next day. We started our day heading into town to the Louisville Slugger Factory and Museum.
This is where they make a majority of all the general Louisville Slugger bats, and they make ALL their Major League bats here. We took the factory tour, which was awesome! They take you right out onto the factory floor where the only thing between you and the machines is a yellow line painted on the floor that they ask you really nicely not to reach over. 🙂 We saw the complete process of bat-making from the tree-trunk to the imprinting of MLB players’ names and laquer finishing. It was very cool and way better than I imagined that it would be.
After the tour, we explored the museum. They had old bats and letters from pros (like Babe Ruth) and there was a room with an exhibit for Willie Mays 75th birthday. The "entrance" to the museum is actually quite genius – you go into a classy theatre and watch a short movie about something to do with baseball, then when it’s over they have you head down to the front of the theatre where doors open and you exit into a hallway with a locker-room scene painted on the walls. At the end of the hall is a stairway that you walk up and you emerge in a dugout in this big room with a replica baseball field in front of you (with mannequin players). It was very well planned and I really like it.
Another fun part of the museum was the pitching demonstration. There was a batting cage set up in the main hall of the museum with a control panel at the "batter’s" end. You stood outside the cage and used the controls to choose an MLB pitcher. Once you had chosen, a video would begin on the screen at the very far end of the cage. It would show the pitcher warming up a little, then he would wind up and throw a pitch… and a ball would actually come out of the screen and straight at you. There was a stuffed "catcher" set up at your end of the cage, and of course there was the cage to protect you, but seeing those balls whizzing at you at 90mph was still enough to make me jump!
We ended our visit with a stop in the gift shop and some picture-taking out by the giant 6-story bat.
Then we walked down to an area called "4th Street Live", which was not very "live" at the time. I think it’s definitely much more of a night-time destination.
We explored a little as we walked back towards the parking garage (but it was quite chilly…) and then we headed back out by the hotel to have a meal at Olive Garden (with the many gift cards I had accumulated from doing on-line surveys!).
The next morning also started off with hotel breakfast, but Irina was very busy with a ton of little soccer players and their families. We were still able to get personalized service though, and Irina made sure we had a made-to-order omlette (when no one else was able to get made-to-order anything!). After checking out, we headed into town again, this time to the waterfront park (the "water" in question being the Ohio river). There was a very fun playground there with rubber mats for the ground and lots of things to climb and slide and spin around on. There was also a really neat stand-up teeter-totter! We walked along the waterfront paths and took some pictures of the 2nd biggest clockface in world at the Colgate factory across the river (FYI – the first biggest is at another Colgate factory in New Jersey). We also walked across the street, through a weird metal chicken art garden (I really have no idea…) to the Louisville Slugger Stadium, where we read that the "Louisville Bats" (a triple A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds) apparently play. It seemed to be pick-up day for season tickets, and we walked around in the lobby and looked out into the stadium. It looked like a really fun play to watch baseball, I would have liked to have gone to a game there.
Our last stop before leaving Louisville was at Glassworks a glass blowing studio and museum/gift shop where we watched the glass blowing artists for about an hour. It really is kind of mesmerizing – they are always keeping their project moving so the hot liquid-y glass doesn’t get drippy and mis-shapen.
Final Assessment: Louisville was definitely a fun place to visit and there are quite a few free/inexpensive things to do there. At the time we went, I think 2 days was plenty enough time for our adventure.
