Travels through Indiana and into Kentucky

9-8-2012

We finished our week in Indianapolis with a dinner with Howard Campbell and Dean Donnellson. They are both doing well. Dean is still at Glick's and Howard is teaching at Ball State.
We attended seminars about tire pressures and loads, diesel generators and battery maintenance among others. We spent some time looking at the new RV's and quite a bit of time looking at all the things the many vendors had.
The people parked on each side of us both bought new RV's. We had no trouble avoiding the temptation.
We left Indianapolis on Friday and drove down to Clarksville, Indiana which is just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky.
We visited Church Hill Downs and the Louisville Slugger bat factory on Saturday.The tour of the bat factory was very interesting. The bats for the major league players are custom made for each player. Originally bats were made by hand by coping a standard mold for each style of bat. They still have hundreds of the different model bats including the model for Babe Ruth's bat.
The next day we drove to Madison, Indiana to see the many historic buildings. We toured the Lenier Mansion and the Schroeder Saddle Tree Museum. They made saddle trees in the factory there from 1878 to 1972.
On the way back we stopped at Clifty Falls State Park but due to the lack of rain there was very little water going over the falls.
The next day we visited Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville and the Mega Cavern. The Mega Cavern goes under the Louisville Zoo. It is an old limestone mine.
we then visited the Falls of the Ohio. This is where Lewis and Clark started their expedition. There is exposed limestone where the falls use to be and you can see all types of fossils. There is a replica of the George Rogers Clark cabin nearby.We drove down river to see the locks.
We left Clarksville on Wednesday, 9-5 and traveled  to Bardstown, Kentucky.
Bardstown is know as the bourbon capital of the world. There were over a 100 distilleries in in Kentucky before Prohibition. Today there is only eleven. The reason all the distilleries are here is due to the  lime stone water. The limestone removes most of the iron.
There are 6 on what is know as the Bourbon Trail. We have visited all 6. Some like Heaven Hill are very large, they have 49 warehouses, with over 20,000 barrels of bourbon in each one.They also bottle many other beverages besides Bourbon. The Makers Mark, Four Roses and Woodford Reserve are all small distilleries.
They tours of the small ones were better than the large ones.We sure tasted a lot of Bourbon. For a whiskey to b called a bourbon it has to have over 51% corn in the mash. It has to be aged in new white oak barrels with the insides charred for at least 19 seconds. Used bourbon barrels are used for whiskey, wine and beer.
We also visited Stephen Foster State Park and toured downtown Bardstown which has many buildings from the 1800's.We has catfish for dinner in the Talbort Tavern which dates back to 1779. We visited the old jail and the old cemetery.
We leave tomorrow for Cave City. I'll post pictures in the next few days.

Dick and Judy