Kentucky Adventures

Leaving St Louis, we headed out across Illinois, aiming for Kentucky. On the way, we stopped briefly in Chester, Illinois, home of the Popeye museum and memorabilia.  It turns out that the author of the Popeye cartoons lived in this town and the town has taken him to heart and set up a little museum of Popeye dolls and trinkets, as well as painted some murals and put up sculptures.  Apparently, even the fire department and police have Popeye patches on their uniforms.  We had a pleasant lunch in a local cafe, easedropping on an in-depth discussion on 1950's cars and some local exploits with them.  Then on to Kentucky. 

Our first stop was at the John James Audubon State Park near Henderson, Kentucky.  It turns out that Audubon spent many years in this area and did quite a bit of his research here while he tried to run a family business.  Eventually he gave up the business world and devoted all his times studying and painting birds.,  But he couldn't get them published in the U.S., and had to go to London to do it.  The museum in this park was built by the WPA, and has the largest collection of his original works in existence. There's some lovely stuff there, including the huge folio editions that are about three feet tall and beautifully detailed.  There's an extensive history of his life and some sculptures and paintings. 

It's also, incidentally, a good place to do birding.  They have wildlife trails, the campground, and some picnic and museum areas, all of which are good birding sites.  And it's exciting to think that you are in the same woods that Audubon may have walked and to get some sense of the world that he worked in when he was there.  The museum also has a very nice observatory area, where they've encased a large room in glass windows and built some great habitat outside the windows for you to watch the birds.  They even provide binoculars, and have microphones piping the sound of the birds into the room.  The birds love it and there are a lot to see. 

 

The town of Henderson, right on the Ohio River, was built on tobacco money in the old days, and has some stately old homes from the era downtown along the river.  We had a pleasant chat in a local museum about the history of the town and the area, and had a very pleasant lunch in a local barbecue place - excellent food.  

Next we were off to the Green River Lake State Park near Campbellsville.  We just squeaked in here because there were few sites available.  Apparently the Kentucky state parks make it a practice to do a Halloween weekend, in which families bring their RVs and their kids to the park for the weekend and dress up, have little parades and costume events, and then trick or treat the entire park.  We ran right out and bought a pile of treats for the little devils and witches.  We are missing our little grandchildren a lot on this trip, so it was nice to see so many kids having a good time.

A highlight of this stop was a trip to the Shaker Village, just up the road a ways.  This is a large and well-developed spot left over from the Shaker experiment in the 1800's.  They have many of the best old buildings from this communal village, and there are people dressed in period costume who show you the tools and crafts of the era as well as explain the history of the movement.  They have a crafts store where they sell many of the same items that the Shakers used to manufacture in their heyday.  It's a fascinating story of a utopian movement that ultimately failed but did some amazing stuff when it was in its prime.

On the way to the Shaker Village, we had a brief tour of Perryville, a civil war battleground park.  This was the site at which the Confederate invasion of Kentucky was turned back by the local Federal troops.  In this part of the country, the Civil War still leaves a huge shadow, and you see memorials and historical sites everywhere. We wandered the field and had a picnic lunch at the sunny and now-peaceful site.

We also took a quick tour of Kentucky barns, heading south to the village of Tompkinsville in a circular route through the southern part of the state.  Ivy loves the old barns in this part of the country, and there are some spectacular ones still in use here, many still used to dry tobacco just as they were at the peak of that business.  We were very much out in the back country, and even wound up taking the only free car ferry in the state, a tiny little barge that carries three cars across a small river, about 100 feet in five minutes. This is a lovely part of the country.

From that park, we headed off to the piece de resistance of our Kentucky stay, the Kentucky Horse Park near Lexington.  This is a gargantuan and amazing place, 1,000 acres, and totally dedicated to horses.  We arrived there a couple of weeks after the very prestigious World Equestrian Games of 2010 had concluded,  so we were able to get a campsite in the park.  It was good biking there, we toured the park on bikes, and I later took a ride into downtown Lexington on a ten mile trail that connects the park to the city.

The park is a multipurpose place, with a whole lot going on.  It has at least three museums including the International Museum of the Horse, a couple of stadiums, paddocks and barns everywhere, and daily demonstrations of different breeds, along with competitions and events like the World Games.  Kentucky is known as the center for horse breeding and racing, and this park lived up to the reputation of the area.  And we did a bit of shopping for our horse-crazy grandkids.
 

Downtown was just as dedicated to the horse.  They had endless statues of horses decorating the streets, just as they use pigs in Seattle.  Local artists decorate the statues and they put them up everywhere.  But the main attractions for us downtown were the homes of Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's wife, and of Henry Clay, a famous politician from just before the Lincoln era that had a large home there.  Both homes are now museums and we toured both, getting a good picture of the two fascinating historical figures. 
 
Next we are off to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and a short visit to relatives in New Jersey.  Winter is closing in, and we're hoping to get all our visits finished and head south before the real cold weather arrives.