Living Our Dream

More Louisville, KY

Shepherdsville, KY - Events of Sunday, Oct. 9 to Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2011

When we arrived at Grandma's RV Camping a few days earlier, we noticed a large flea market behind the campground as we exited the interstate. We watched a steady stream of cars pouring into the flea market as we did our cleaning chores in the motor home on Saturday morning and relaxed in the afternoon. On Sunday, we decided to walk over to check it out.

The flea market calls itself as "The Most Awesome Flea Market in the World," or Awesome Flea Market for short.

As you can see from the photo above, there is a large building that houses regular indoor vendor stalls and a fairly big outdoor section. We started out inside the building because it was closer to the campground and because it was a little cool in the morning. We wanted to give the sun a little more time to peek through the haze and warm things up.

Inside, Margery paused at one stall to oooh and ahhh over the puppies that were for sale.

The flea market had a nice variety of new and used merchandise, and we saw quite a few people carrying bags filled with purchases. Fortunately, we escaped without buying anything.

After the flea market, we relaxed some more and watched the NASCAR race. Although we couldn't get the Steeler game, we found out they beat the Tennessee Titans 34 - 17 in spite of the fact Roethlisberger is playing with a sprained foot.

On Monday, we drove back toward Louisville to see Chuchill Downs, home of the famed Kentucky Derby. As with baseball, we're not into horse racing, but almost everyone has heard of or watched the Kentucky Derby a few times on television so we couldn't pass up the opportunity to visit the home of such a well-known event.

Churchill Downs has a Kentucky Derby Museum which includes lots of history of the race and information on thoroughbreds. The $14 entrance fee for the museum ($13 for seniors) includes a 30-minute walking tour of the track. Behind the scenes and barn tours are also available at an additional cost. The next photo shows Gate 1 for the track and the entrance to the museum to the left.

Our timing was good since we only had about 10 minutes until the next walking tour. We spent a little time just inside the entrance of the museum getting oriented, and they announced the start of the next tour within a few minutes.

The tour guide was excellent. He gave us a lot of history about the track, about the Kentucky Derby and about thoroughbred race horses in general. The first derby was held in 1875, and it has been held every year for the last 137 years. The race is held the first Saturday in May and is for three year old thoroughbreds.

In addition to the Kentucky Derby, Churchill Downs hosts the Kentucky Oaks on the Friday before the Derby. The Oaks is a race for three-year old fillies. Churchill Downs also has a regular racing schedule from the end of October through November and from the end of April through July 4th.

The horses are brought to the track for races from the barns located to the south. The next photo shows the paddock area where horses are saddled prior to the race.

We also got to see the grandstands and the track. Below is a view of the track toward the finish line (the white pole to the right).

The spire in the next photo is one of the original twin spires that mark the oldest section (formerly the barns) of the grandstand where most of the owners and trainers sit to watch the race. The other spire is just out of the picture to the left.

Millionaires' Row, which is the upper three levels of the section in the next photo, is where celebrities sit. 

After touring the grandstands and track areas, we went back to the museum. Hats for the ladies on Derby day are a must, and the museum has a display of some of the more unusual ones. The hat on the bottom row right next to Margery is a horse's butt. The black strip is the horse's tail that looked like it was made from yarn.

Later, Margery got to try some of the hats for sale in the gift shop.

The Kentucky Derby presents a lot of opportunity for fund raisers and balls in the days leading up to the race. The gown to the left in the next photo was worn by the chairwoman of a fundraiser for the museum. Since the Kentucky Derby is called the "Run for the Roses," the gown is appropriately covered by roses made from red fabric.

The reason the Kentucky Derby is called the "Run for the Roses" is because of the rose garland that is placed around the neck of the winning horse in the winner's circle.

 

The photo above depicts the 2011 winner, Animal Kingdom. The garland consists of 564 roses all in individual water vials wrapped in foliage and sewn to a fabric backing. The top center has one additional rose for every horse running in that year's Derby.

There are a lot of displays of trophies, photos of past winners, videos of Kentucky Derby races, information on famous jockeys, and information of many famous horses. There are also numerous hands-on displays, and Paul couldn't resist trying on jockey silks and sitting on a mock-up of a horse in a starting gate. You can almost hear the announcer yell, "...and they're off!"

Margery tried her hand at video horse racing. There are controls to move your horse right and left and a button to use your riding crop. She finished second.

We really enjoyed visiting Churchill Downs and getting to know a little more about thoroughbred horse racing and the history of the Kentucky Derby.

On Tuesday, we decided to drive through Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest located one exit south of where we were staying in Shepherdsville to get a taste of fall foliage. The Bernheim Arboretum and Forest was established by Isaac Bernheim, who was a successful whiskey distiller. Bernham purchased 14,000 acres of land and gave it as a gift to be held in trust for the people of Kentucky.

The arboretum, which is near the entrance, is planted with different varieties of specimen trees and shrubs. The photo below shows some of those trees overlooking a prairie.

Most of the area is natural forest. Although there were some trees starting to turn and a few falling leaves floating through the air, peak tree color is still at least 10 days to two weeks away in western Kentucky. 

The along the roads that wind through the Bernheim Arboretum and Forest there are numerous parking areas (many with picnic tables) and dozens of hiking trails. We stopped and walked a short loop trail so we could enjoy the fall air.

There were some sort of gnat-like bugs that kept buzzing in our faces and trying to fly into our eyes and ears. Margery's glasses helped protect her eyes, and she devised a method to protect her ears by sticking leaves under the temples of her glasses. Much to Paul's surprise, it worked remarkably well. 

Driving and walking through the Bernheim Arboretum and Forest satisfied our need to experience fall. That, along with the gradual cooling of the weather during the week we were in the Louisville area were good reasons to continue heading south. We'll tell you about where we stopped in our next post.

Louisville, KY

Shepherdsville, KY - Events of Wednesday, Oct. 5 to Friday, Oct. 7, 2011

After 8 days at Caesar Creek State Park in Willmington, OH, we drove about three hours southwest to Grandma's RV Camping about 20 miles south of Louisville in Shepherdsville, KY. Grandma's has about half back-ins and half pull-throughs. Although they are a decent length, the sites (especially the pull-throughs) are quite close together. The roads are paved, as are the small patios; but the patios are a little too far toward the rear of the sites for motor homes. The sites themselves are all gravel (the gravel is fresh, clean and plentiful) with no grass. There are full hookups with 30/50-amp electric and free Wi-Fi. The utilities are also toward the rear of the site, which is not bad for 5th wheels, but we needed all 30 feet of our sewer hose for our motor home. The next photo, which was taken when the sites on either side of us were unoccupied, shows our site at Grandma's.

And below is a shot looking down the road from our site.

Grandma's is conveniently located right off I-65, and that means there is quite a bit of traffic noise. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the traffic noise almost covers up the sound of the trains. Oh yeah, and if the wind is blowing the right direction, the campground is also on the glide path for the Louisville airport.

We complained about cool weather up north, and with a general warming trend across the eastern half of the country plus moving a little farther south, the 50 to 60º highs and 40º lows have given way to highs around 80º and lows in the mid 50s. Not only that, but the sun is out a lot more than it was up north. Ahhhh, that's more like it!

We continue to be in relaxation mode, but there were a few things we wanted to see in the Louisville area. One was the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. Louisville Slugger, whose official company name is the Hillerich & Bradsby Co., is the world's largest manufacturer of baseball and softball bats. Hillerich & Bradsby also makes sports and recreational gloves and golf clubs. The most distinguishing feature of the museum is the "Big Bat," which is the world's largest bat.

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The 120-foot tall bat is hollow and is made from steel. It weighs 68,000 pounds. It would take a real power hitter to swing that one!

The museum is loaded with baseball memorabilia, and it has several displays depicting the history of the company. J. F. Hillerich opened a woodworking shop in Louisville back in 1855. The shop made bed posts, stair railings, bowling pins and butter churns. Although the story is sometimes disputed, legend has it that Hillerich's 17-year old son, Bud, took off work one afternoon in 1884 to watch Louisville's professional baseball team play. Pete Browning, who was a star player for the Louisville Eclipse, broke his bat during that game.

As the story goes, young Bud offered to make Browning a new bat at his father's wood shop, and Browning got three hits with his new bat the next day.

With Browning's success, Bud got orders for more bats from Eclipse players. The elder Hillerich didn't want anything to do with baseball bats; but word of the success of players using bats made at the Hillerich shop spread, and he eventually relented and began to embrace the new addition to his business.

The bats were originally sold under the name "Falls City Slugger" because of the location of Louisville near a waterfall on the Ohio River. Bud changed the name to Louisville Slugger when he took over the business from his father in 1894.

In 1911, Frank Bradsby joined the company. Bradsby became a full partner in 1916, and the company name was changed to Hillerich & Bradsby Co.

A factory tour is included in the $10 museum admission fee ($9 for seniors), but photos are not permitted inside the factory itself. Therefore, Margery missed getting a picture of Paul swooning at the smell of fresh sawdust when we first entered the factory. He still misses his workshop.

There are, however, a couple of displays in the museum that relate to the manufacturing process that we could photograph. The logs in the next photo show how the blanks for the bats, called billets, are taken from the logs. The log to the left shows the more modern method where a boring machine extracts the billets from an intact log. This method maximizes the number of billets that can be obtained from each log. In the method shown on the right, the log is first split into wedges, then the wedges are turned on a lathe to form the billets.

Another display in the museum shows the process that turns the billets from wedges. Those are mannequins in the photo below, not real people. The display is very realistic right down to sawdust everywhere, including on the workers themselves.

On the factory tour, we learned how bats are made from the billets. Most bats are made from ash, but some are made from maple. Maple is more brittle and prone to breaking, but some players think maple gives them an advantage.

Minor league bats and bats for the general consumer market are made on tracer lathes. The cutting head on the lathe follows a stylus that traces a metal pattern of the bat's contour. The pattern can be changed to produce different sizes and styles of bats. It used to take 20 minutes for a skilled operator to hand turn a bat. A tracer lathe can turn a bat in 30 seconds.

Bats for professional players are made on CNC (computer numeric control) lathes because these lathes can programmed to produce an almost infinite combination of size, shape and weight characteristics. Of course, these characteristics must be kept within the limits of the rules. Professional players take thousands of swings a year, and they can feel subtle differences in their bat. Over their careers, they develop preferences for certain characteristics in a bat. The machine can remember each program, so changing from one style of bat to another is as easy as pushing a couple of buttons. A CNC lathe takes about 45 seconds to turn a bat.

After the bats are turned, they are sanded and branded. Some bats are flame tempered and some bats are dipped in color. The bats are then finished by dipping them in clear lacquer.

After we finished the factory tour, we had time to look around the museum a little more. Although Paul was somewhat of a baseball fan when he was a kid, neither one of us follows baseball today. If you are an avid fan, however, there are lots of things of interest. For example, you can don white gloves or batting gloves and handle bats used in actual games by well-known players such as Mickey Mantle and Johnny Bench.

Other historical bats like the one shown below belonging to Babe Ruth are much more rare and are housed under protective covers.

Babe Ruth, who played from 1914 to 1935, was the most prolific hitter of his time. In fact, his 1927 record of 60 home runs in one season stood for 34 years, and wasn't broken until 1961 by Roger Maris. He is regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in American culture. There are several mannequins of famous players including one of Babe Ruth in a classic pose watching the ball go over the outfield wall.

There were numerous other bats on display including one belonging to Joltin' Joe DiMagio shown below partly out of the photo to the right. Paul was more interested in one of the bats in the drawer (the one just visible over the top of the drawer front) that belonged to Roberto Clemente.

Roberto Clemente, who was born in Puerto Rico, played his entire 18-season major league career with the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1972. Clemente is considered by some to be the greatest right fielder to have ever played the game. His career was cut short in 1972 when he was tragically killed in a plane crash while helping in a relief effort to aid earthquake victims in Nicaragua. As we said, Paul did follow baseball back when he was a kid, and he was fortunate enough to have seen Roberto Clemente play in person several times.

Another famous Pittsburgh Pirate was Honus Wagner. Wagner played from 1897 to 1917, mostly for the Pirates. He is considered to be one of the best short stops ever, and he was an excellent all-round player. The photo below shows his jersey and one of his bats. Honus Wagner was the first baseball player to endorse the Louisville Slugger bat.

The museum also has a 20-minute movie about baseball. Since our parking meter was about to run out and since we don't follow baseball, we decided to skip the movie.

Everyone on the factory tour receives a miniature souvenir bat. Paul tried his out next to the "Big Bat" on our way out of the museum.

We found more to do and see in the Louisville area, so stay tuned.

Frankfort, KY

We stayed a week in Frankfort, and we planned a mixture of relaxing, visiting and sightseeing.

Frankfort, KY, was founded in the late 1700s and is named for Stephen Frank, who was a pioneer killed by Indians along the Kentucky River. The nearby river crossing became known as Frank's Ford, which was later changed to Frankfort.

Frankfort became the state capital shortly after Kentucky became a state in 1792. The current capitol building, shown in a side view from an overlook on U. S. Highway 60 in the photo below, was completed in 1910.

 

Our first full day in the area we stopped at Walmart and at Kroger, which is Margery's favorite grocery chain. She was most disappointed when Kroger pulled out of the Pittsburgh market in the early 1980s, and we stop at Kroger every chance we get as we travel.

Our next stop, which also involved food, was at Rebecca Ruth Candies.

In 1919, Rebecca Gooch and Ruth Hanly quit teaching and co-founded a candy-making business that they ran out of of the Frankfort Hotel. They rented the barroom, which had been closed by Prohibition.

in 1924, Ruth Hanly married Douglas Booe. Although Ruth and her husband moved away from Frankfort, Ruth continued to make candy. When her husband died only a few years later, Ruth moved back to Frankfort. In 1929, Rebecca decided to get married and sell her share of the business to Ruth.

Kentucky is bourbon country, and in the 1930s, Ruth perfected a recipe and a process to combine bourbon into her candy. Her bourbon balls became wildly popular.

We went to Rebecca Ruth Candies during the week hoping to take a tour; but unfortunately, there was nothing going on the morning we were there. We had to settle for a sample of their bourbon balls, which were yummy. You could definitely taste the bourbon, but it didn't overpower the richness of the chocolate.

Temptation got the better of us, and we bought a couple of pieces of chocolate candy. Paul had an orange jelly with dark chocolate, and Margery had a chocolate-covered cherry. We stopped on a bench outside the shop to enjoy our treats.

We also bought some bourbon/pecan brittle for the road. It was yummy, too.

North of Lexington and about 45 minutes over hill and dale to the east of where we were staying in Frankfort is Georgetown, KY, which is the location of a Toyota automobile plant. Officially known at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK), this plant manufactures Camry sedans, Camry Hybrids, Avalon sedans, and Venza crossover SUVs. The plant was opened in 1988.

The Toyota plant has tours, so we headed over one morning for their 10:00 AM tour. Reservations for tours are required. The photo below shows the driveway to the visitor entrance.

 

And the next photo shows the tour entrance.

It's difficult to get a good view of the plant from the road, but with an area of about 7.2 million square feet the plant is immense. There is a scale model inside the visitor center where you can only get a small inkling of the sprawl.

At the beginning of the tour, everyone gets headsets so they can hear the tour guide and safety glasses before boarding trams. Photography is not permitted in the plant, so we'll try to give you a quick description of the manufacturing process.

There are two assembly lines in the plant that can turn out a combined total of almost 2,300 cars a day. Current output is about 1,900 cars, which is much better than their lowest point of less than 1,200 a day.

Each line has two shifts with several hours between shifts. The time between shifts allows for overtime should the shift not be able to make the required number of cars for the day's orders.

A trailer truck load of steel in the form of large coils comes into the plant about every 30 minutes. Huge sheers cut blanks for various body parts. Robots load the blanks into punch presses to form the body panels, and more robots perform thousands of welds to assemble car bodies in a shower of sparks.

It takes about 20 hours from the time the steel is first cut until a car manufactured from that piece of steel rolls out the door. The vehicle shell spends about 9 of those 20 hours in the paint department where is is washed, prepped, dipped, primed, sanded, painted, clear-coated and inspected. We got to see almost all parts of the manufacturing process except the engine plant, which is in a separate building, and the painting. Because the paint department must be kept free from dust and dirt, access is limited. Employees of the paint department must wear coveralls, hats, hairnets, etc. to keep the air as clean as possible.

The bodies, trunks, hoods and doors of each vehicle are all painted at the same time. After painting, the cars start down the assembly line. The doors are separated and go upstairs to have windows, speakers and locks installed. As the cars roll down the line, teams of four workers install dashboards, wiring, accessories, seats, brakes, engines and transmissions. Each team member can sound an alarm if he or she has a problem. The team leader will rush to assist, and if the problem can't be resolved, the team leader has the authority to shut down the line. Near the end of the assembly line the completed doors return to the bodies in exactly the same order and at precisely the right time to rejoin their original bodies.

TMMK practices "just-in-time" manufacturing, which was pioneered by Toyota. Just-in-time means raw materials and parts show up on the factory floor just as they are needed for the next step in the manufacturing process. No more than four hours worth of parts and materials are in the plant at any given time. This means every delivery from an outside supplier and each step of the assembly process must be carefully choreographed so shortages don't develop.

Paul, who has a manufacturing background, was very impressed by the Toyota operation. He has never toured an auto plant before, and the size and complexity of the operation really impressed him. Commitment to quality was stressed throughout the tour (they say quality is their most important product and safety is their most important process), and it's easy to see why Toyota vehicles are so popular.

After the tour, we watched a short movie that provided info on some of the areas we didn't get to see on the tour like the engine plant and the paint department. Back in the visitor center, we checked out some of the new cars on display like the Camry in the photo below.

 

We still have more to report from our stay in the Frankfort/Lexington area, including a review of another barbecue restaurant, so stay tuned.