June 28, 2010

June 28, 2010

We spent last night in Bardstown, KY at Our Old Kentucky Home state park. Also in the park is a golf course and outdoor theatre showing the musical, The Stephen Foster Story. It was nice but hooomid! Stephen Foster was America’s first professional songwriter. He is actually from Pennsylvania but has been adopted by the locals because of his song, “My Old Kentucky Home”. He is famous for songs like “Oh Susanna”, “Way down upon the Swanee river”, “Camptown races, and “Beautiful dreamer”. They are catchy tunes, and to Aimee’s displeasure I spent the day whistling them.

We had planned to take advantage of the golf course at our doorstep but it rained all night. So we left town. We only made it a few miles when we ran into the Jim Beam distillery. It is the largest so we felt the obligation to stop. There was no tour but we partook of an early morning tasting with a group of square dancers and Swedes.

Crossing north into Indiana we stopped at Falls of the Ohio State Park. Unbeknownst to me the Ohio River was unnavigable past this point because of a waterfall here. This caused travelers to stop here and a large community popped up. Eventually a canal was dug and Louisville thrived. The Interpretative Center had exhibits on the area. The falls flows over an ancient coral reef formed 350 million years ago when this area was a shallow sea. After running thru the exhibits, we walk out to the riverbank to look for fossils from Devonian times, the Age of Fishes.

From Louisville, we continued west to Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial. The exhibit room continues Lincoln’s early story. He spent his teenage years here. His father moved the family to frontier Indiana to find land that he could buy with a clear Federal title. Unfortunately two years later his mother died of milk disease, a not uncommon frontier disease. Unknown at the time, when cattle graze on wooded lands they can ingest deadly white snakeroot which poisons the milk. We walk around this frontier farm. Growing up on the frontier, Abe had almost no formal schooling but yet learned to read and write and do “ciphering”.

We spend the night next door at Lincoln State Park not sure of what time it is. The counties in this part of Indiana are all in different time zones. Not Central and Eastern, but rather “fast time” and “slow time”.