23. OLD LOUISVILLE

Louisville, Kentucky

9/25/2009

Old Louisville prides itself on being the third-largest historic district in the United States. In our previous trips I’ve made sure I’ve done my research on these “wander through old neighborhoods looking at houses” destinations so we knew what highlights to search for, but since this trip was such a last-minute thing, we set my beloved GPS to send us to the Old Louisville visitor center and hoped they would send us in the right direction. The ladies working there were very friendly, but not particularly helpful. They gave us a map of the historic district, which is a very slick looking document, but only provides a tourist with street names. It was useless to us since it provided no information on any of the historic buildings or even where they were located. To compare, when we visited Madison, Indiana we were provided with a map that marked the locations of significant buildings and some information on their history.

This is not to say that historic Louisville was a bust. It is a beautiful town, and while exploring we did see many beautiful old homes of various architectural styles. (It seems many of them have been transformed into student housing.) Still, I would have liked to have been able to know exactly what we were looking at.

It was quite muggy that evening, and after wandering around for awhile in search of someplace to get a drink (again, our useless map not much help) we came upon a place called the Third Avenue Café. I had forgotten that this place was specifically mentioned in Schultz’ book as a highlight of Old Louisville – it was only a coincidence that we happened to go inside. A waitress tried to give us some menus, but we explained that we only wanted to get something to drink. She seemed annoyed and when we approached the bar area she and two other employees all tried to get each other to serve us. Supposedly, it’s a coffee shop, but when one of the employees finally decided to be the one to help us, he had difficulty making our iced mochas. After about ten minutes, we finally got our very watery drinks.

22. LOUISVILLE SLUGGER MUSEUM AND FACTORY

Louisville, Kentucky

9/25/2009

Neither Laura and I are baseball fans, but visiting the place where all major league baseball bats are produced (or so said our tour guide) is visiting an inescapable center of an important part of Americana. This is a neat little place. There is a small museum with examples of baseball bats used by some of the great players, but the majority of the experience comes through touring the working factory. And that’s exactly what it is. You walk through the factory floor watching workers operate the machines that produce the baseball bats. It was interesting, but I found it slightly voyeuristic. For example, we watched as an assembly line worker placed baseball bats on a conveyer belt which were shot through a machine, at which point he went and collected them at the other side. Repeat. This is this man’s job – and for eight hours a day tourists like us walk by and stare at him like he’s a zoo exhibit. Everyone working there seemed very cheerful, but no doubt they’re expected to be. Don’t get me wrong. It was fascinating to see how baseball bats are made (I never thought about what an art form it really is), but I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to actually work there.

21. LOUISVILLE CUISINE

Louisville, Kentucky

9/25/2009

Discovering that my school would be closed on the last Friday of September, Laura and I decided to take advantage of the holiday to take a quick daytrip to Pittsburgh (a three-hour drive) and knock off a few places on the list. Luckily, the night before we were about to leave I checked to make sure everything would still be open – only to discover that due to the G20 summit being held in Pittsburgh that day, practically the whole city was being shut down. Undeterred, but with very little time to plan, we switched destination to Louisville – still three-hours away, but just in a different direction.

Patricia Schultz raves about Louisville cuisine, so we made that somewhat the focus of the trip. In particular, she talks about something called a “Hot Brown” – which neither of us had heard of, but is supposedly a Louisville specialty. Invented at the Brown Hotel (hence the name), we made the acquisition of one our first goal. I sang “Hot Brown” to the tune of “My Girl” all the way there. Laura was happy when the drive was over.

Let me just say that the Brown Hotel is so fancy I was afraid they were going to kick us out for being too poor. Like somehow they could tell. Apparently, there’s a dress code for dinner at the main restaurant. Lunch is a little more casual, thankfully. We ate in the J. Graham Café – the hotel’s lunch restaurant and birthplace of the Hot Brown. I had the Hot Brown, while Laura took advantage of the lunch buffet they were having. The food was extremely excellent. The Hot Brown is basically an open-faced turkey sandwich, but that description doesn’t really make it sound very good. Trust me. It’s a memorable meal. Absolutely deserving of its reputation.

The service was really good, although we did have one slight complaint. It seemed most of the wait staff were French, and although they were very polite to the customers while speaking English, they fought very loudly amongst themselves in their native language. It seems as though because they realized that none of us could understand what they were saying, they had become oblivious to the fact that we could still HEAR them.

After visiting the Slugger Museum and Old Louisville, we ended our trip at the “say it like it is”-named Homemade Ice Cream and Pie Kitchen. This place was on the opposite end of fancy compared to the Brown Hotel, but the food was just as delicious – just in a different way. For $5 we got a half-sandwich, a salad and a piece of their world-famous homemade pie. Consider that a grade-d meal at McDonald’s will cost you more than that. I had derby pie and Laura had chess pie – for the authentic Kentucky experience, of course. Laura doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but she wanted another piece. That’s high praise from her.