A Full Day

Thursday of this week seems like the busiest we have had. For starters, we went to the Louiseville Slugger's Factory and Museum. The entrance is marked by a giant, 6 story, baseball bat! The factory tour was actually very interesting but Zach's favorite part was getting a custom engraved bat. Go figure. Everyone (minus Mum and I because our hand-eye coordination= 0) went to the indoor batting cages to test their skill with the most famous baseball bats in history. On our way out of the museum, we happened to spot the Colgate factory about a mile away. We drove by but to no avail, they don't give tours. :( Next stop on our list was the Kentucky Derby. Nothing exciting was going on so we just drove by but that is still kind of cool. Then on to Fort Knox. As you can imagine, we didn't get a tour their either! Here we come driving down the road toward the gates to our nation's wealth and we get stopped by a rather heavily armed security guard. His opening line was "Sir, are you trying to invade Fort Knox?" It was pretty funny. Once we swiftly manuevered our way back onto a public highway, we saw a sign for Mammoth Caves. We had nothing better to do so we stopped by. Unlice Carlsbad Caverns, Mammoth Caves are the longest set of caves in the world and were carved out by underground streams. This means that they are pretty narrow and you have to duck quite a bit. After that, we drove onward towards Nashville, Tennessee. By chance, we decided to pay a visit to the Grand Ole Opry. We were just going to go out to dinner but Dad ran in and they had unsold tickets. If you don't know what the Grand Ole Opry is, don't worry, I didn't either. It is infact, one of the world's most famous country music venues. The perfect place to go while you're in Nashville! I didn't know anyone but one performer (I'm not all that into country music) but, supposedly there were some very famous country legends. We saw: Jeannie Seely (who looks like she wears a bad wig), Connie Smith, Mark Wills (who sang my favorite country song, 19 Something), Jimmy C. Newman (the Alligator Man), Mountain Heart (the main banjo player/lead singer only has a thumb on his left hand!), David Ball, Jean Shepard, Jesse McReynolds & the Virginia Boys, Raul Malo (who I did not like), Jim Ed Brown, Buddy Jewell (who played his fantastic new song, This Ain't Mexico), and Mandy Barnett. It was a lot of fun!