Day 4 - Mmmmmmmm, Pie

Day 4 was the first day of the trip where we were spending a whole day in a city, Louisville.

The first stop on the agenda was the Louisville Slugger Factory/Museum. It is actually where they make all of the wood bats, both the ones you will see at Modell's (or any other sports equipment place) as well as bats for the major leaguers. Today they were making Hanley Ramirez's bats (By the way, this is the 2nd reference to Hanley Ramirez in my 4 days of blogging. Not sure what that means.) The tour was only about 20-30 minutes, and was quite interesting to see how they use the combination of machinery and old fashioned work by hand to make the bats. It used to take 20+ minutes to shape a single bat out of a piece of wood, now it takes about 30 seconds a retail bat and 45 seconds for an MLB player's bat. But they still hand brand the logo onto the bats and hand dip them to get the different finishes on them.

Our Sluggers

For souvenirs the boys both got personalized wood bats, which at about $50 each they will NEVER, EVER use in a game, as there is little doubt that they will get broken within the first 5-8 pitches they see. These bats will very likely simply serve as additional clutter in their rooms. But, they do look nice.

After we left the Slugger factory and had a "classic" Louisville lunch of pizza and calzones (evidently Louisville isn't known for any special food), we headed to the Muhammad Ali Center. Ali grew up in Louisville, and this center is quite an impressive facility devoted to Ali and his life. We were able to watch the entire Rumble In The Jungle, which introduced the term "rope a dope" to the world. The amazing thing was also how Ali kept talking to George Foreman all throughout the fight. Clearly this served to annoy Foreman, which made him throw more and more wild punches, tiring him out so Ali could finish him off in the 8th round. They just don't make boxing matches like that anymore. In fact, since Tyson went wacko, has anyone cared about boxing? Does anyone know who the heavyweight champion is today? I don't.

Different Versions of Sluggers

It was when we left the Ali center that we kind of noticed that we were pretty much the only ones in the city. Wherever we walked, there just didn't seem to be many people around. We wondered whether we had missed some sort of evacuation notice about Louisville. If you know something we don't, please text me.

After the Ali Center, we headed to the Louisville Science Center. Finally, we had something for Amanda. They had a whole area with a Sesame Street theme about the body, and the rest of the museum was all hands-on. She loved it. As did the boys.

We finally left the Science Center around 6:00 and needed to find someplace to eat dinner. Louisville has an area called 4th Street with a bunch of restaurants/bars, but instead of going to another Friday's type place, we consulted the Roadfood Book. If you ever do a road trip anything like this one, I highly recommended the Roadfood Book. It gives you places that are not the fanciest places in town, but are fun places with good food. For dinner we went to Lynn's Paradise Cafe, which is kind of hard to describe. The decor is tacky, on purpose, with a gift shop as the entry point that has nothing that anyone would ever really need, but is all funny stuff. The menu has breakfast and dinner foods, and when we asked what was good, the answer was "everything." And the waitress was right. I had an early Thanksgiving, with turkey and stuffing, Ethan had jambalaya pasta, Brian and Debbie shared a breakfast burrito and a Reuben quesadilla, and Amanda went WAY outside her comfort zone and had a cheeseburger with fries (in truth, I believe Amanda will break the all-time record for most cheeseburgers and fries in a 3-week stretch - Guinness World Records is following her progress).

For dessert, we went to another Roadfood recommendation called Homemade Ice Cream and Pie Kitchen. This place could be the most ingenious place EVER created. Everyone likes good ice cream. Most people like homemade pies. Why not put the two together so you can order a slice of pie with the ice cream you want? Seriously, why isn't this a national chain? Ethan and I both opted for the Dutch Apple Pie (I had it with cinnamon ice cream and Ethan chose chocolate chip), Brian had Banana Meringue Cream Pie and Amanda went WAY outside her comfort zone and had vanilla and chocolate ice cream (she did splurge with the chocolate sauce). Debbie didn't officially have pie, but let's just say that I ate about half of mine, and there was almost nothing left when we were ready to leave.

After a full day in the city of Louisville we called it a night and headed back to the hotel. Long day of driving ahead tomorrow as we head to Memphis, with a likely stop in Nashville.