#1, repeat after me: Loo-uh-vul. Loo-uh-vul. With the stress, if any, on the first syllable.
Say it quickly and run the sounds together so the "uh" almost disappears and they won't know you from a local.
NOT Lew-ee-ville. Loo-uh-vul.
There's Old Louisville, home to the largest surviving conglomeration of Victorian homes in the US, and there's NuLu (new Louisville), home to dozens of trendy hipster restaurants. Four of them were reviewed by Andrew Zimmern in the fifth episode of his Travel Channel TV show,
The Zimmern List.
Louisville is about four counties over from Bourbon County, from whence the beverage takes its name, but I think most liquor is distilled either in or around Lexington.
They just closed Churchill Downs for the winter but they start racing again regularly in late April. Plus they have museum tours sometimes even when there's no racing going on.
The Hillerich & Bradsby (Louisville Slugger) baseball bat factory is ... guess where? They also have a museum. There's also a museum for the Louisville Lip, Muhammad Ali.
The Speed Art Museum is a respectable effort for a city that size. I went there some years back for an Ansel Adams show.
Col. Harlan Sanders, founder of KFC is buried in the Cave Hill cemetery. So is George Rogers Clark of Lewis & Clark fame. And Muhammad Ali. Lots of interesting "artwork." One tombstone looks like the Sphinx.
After fried chicken, Louiville's most significant gastronomic gift to the world is the Hot Brown, an open-faced roast turkey, bacon & cheese sammich served with Mornay sauce. Invented and still a specialty at the Brown Hotel in downtown.
Louisville has the world's largest bat. What kind of bat, you ask? Why ... both kinds. The giant baseball bat is at the H&B factory. The giant (model of a) vampire bat is two blocks from there at corner of 10th & Main.
Fort Knox is about half an hour from Louisville. You can drive past the gold depository (clearly visible from the Interstate) and the George S. Patton Museum is on post. Lots of old clanky old tanky stuff there but what I found most memorable were personal items owned by Gen. Patton himself (including the car he crashed in, leading to his death) and the mock-up of the gold depository used as a prop in the Bond film "Goldfinger." Which I find a little weird because Miami was as close as any of the filming got to Ft Knox.
In Bardstown (about 40 miles from Louisville), The Oscar Getz museum of whiskey history.
Mammoth Cave is about 75 miles fom Louisville, the longest known cave system in the world. More than 400 miles mapped so far. All tours are electrically lighted (except the opnes labeled "wild"), the temperature is ~55F year round. There are restaurants and "relief facilities" in the cave. Some of the rooms are so big (and there was relief from summer heat) they historically were used for entertainment facilities. There's one natural amphitheater that was used for stage performances. Edwin Booth, brother to John Wilkes Booth, once performed there.
The Chevy Corvette is built in Bowling Green, about 120 miles from Louisville. There's also a Corvette museum there.
But I've spent more than too much time at Ft Knox. If it were me, I'd look to visit DC first, if you've never been. The Smithsonians, Mt Rushmore, Monticello, the Mall, Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, Washington monument, Arlington cemetery. If you're into airplanes, there's nowhere on earth like the Air & Space Museum and it's annex at Dulles, the Udvar-Hazy Center. Everything from a Wright Flyer to Lindbergh's actual Spirit of St Louis to the actual Enola Gay (dropped "the bomb" on Hiroshima).
And it's a short jaunt from there to several major War Between the States battlefields; Gettysburg, Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and others. And the Appomattox courthouse. Stonewall Jackson was shot at Chancellorsville, had his wounded arm amputated but died anyway, is buried in
Lexington, Va., but his arm is buried on the grounds of
Ellwood Manor, near Fredericksburg.
