A museum day - Day 1161 (Year 4, Day 66)

Clarksville, IN / Louisville, KY

Not much to report on for the rest of last week.  Services were lovely and there was a nice kiddush lunch in honor of a baby naming and another baby born within the past month.

We had promised ourselves that we would try as hard as possible to use every Sunday to do fun stuff since we both work so hard during the week and it's the only opportunity we have to explore the myriad things to do in the area.

There is a place in downtown Louisville called "Museum Row" which houses a bunch of museums (history, science & art), as well as a few distilleries (Evan Williams, Peerless) and the Performing Arts Center.  Each place has it's own $10+ admission fee but there is an offer to purchase a ticket that lets you into everything, which basically comes out to about 50% off.  So we decided to go that route since many of the places on that ticket were places we wanted to visit anyway.  Also, downtown Louisville is only about 10 minutes away.

We started out the day on Sunday, after my doing a load of laundry, with my getting a haircut (they didn't open until 11:00, but the museums didn't open until noon, so it worked out perfectly).  The plan was to visit the history museum and then Evan Williams.  We took our urb-es with us and found that riding them around downtown was very enjoyable, as the sidewalks were wide and mostly even, and there was practically no one walking there.  Some photos of the downtown area (way back, when the downtown was built, it was predominantly an industrial area for the tobacco industry):

    

This is a photo of the Louisville Slugger Museum.  We didn't visit there (yet) but I love the Louisville Slugger baseball bat which is taller than the building!



We arrived at the Frazier History Museum at 12:30 pm and didn't leave until 4:30!  So much to see and do there; such an amazing place (if you're into history).  It could have been much more as they had an exhibit (a movie and an entire floor) devoted to The Hunger Games.  It's not something we ever read or watched, so we chose to skip that.  Mostly we spent our time between 2 other exhibits:  Lewis & Clark and Prohibition, 2 major events that affected this area of Kentucky.

  


I was extremely impressed by the way the museum was set up, with  many interactive exhibits.  So much scenery and sound effects to make it seem so real!  Besides learning so much, you really felt like you were part of the history. Kudos to the curators.

To prove the point, in the Lewis & Clark exhibit:
 
  

(not sure if you can see the bear behind me in the background "attacking" me!)

And in the Speakeasy part of the Prohibition exhibit - the "bartender" doing some card tricks (we actually played a betting game that folks back then would have played, that required no real thought -- kind of like the game of War but with betting):



Had to love this one:



In that exhibit, they played different music depending on what room you were in.  I never realized that "Happy Days are Here Again" was based on the end of Prohibition!  Does make a lot of sense though.

By the time we finished going through the museum, based on both the hour and our exhaustion levels, we decided it was time to go home.  Perhaps we'll go to Evan Williams and maybe another museum next Sunday.  Meanwhile, looking forward to another work week (not liking having to work, but very grateful to G-d that we have a livelihood and can work).