O Little Town of Campbellsville

Posted by Linny on Dec 22, 2013 in Blog, Photos, Travel | 0 comments

Well, it’s official. We are free to roam about the country once again. Our jobs ended yesterday and after a horrendous rain storm last night with tornado-like winds that forced us to get up and pull in our slides at 1am, we are soggy, and tired, but excited to be moving on to our next thing. We’re going to jump the timeline slightly here. Our hope was to post our last blog entry about “pre-Kentucky” before this one, but oh well. We should have some more time on our hands to write, now that we’re unemployed again.

This post, then Raleigh/VA Beach/Fancy Gap, then our psuedo-exposé on Ama-hell – you can hang with that right?

We arrived in Campbellsville, Kentucky back on October 24th, 2013. We had done a little research on the place before arriving so we knew only a few key facts, like the population – 9100, that it had a small University right downtown, that Amazon was the largest employer, and that the weather should be wintery, but on the milder side. Over the course of our two-month stay, we’ve certainly gotten to know her better and so to honor our temporary hometown on the day of our departure, here is a list of the top ten things we love about Campbellsville (and the surrounding area).

#1. It’s located in Taylor County which they refer to as a “moist county” – which makes me laugh. That means some restaurants can serve drinks, but no other stores can sell alcohol. This might seem like a negative, but Campbellsville is located one half-hour away from Maker’s Mark, Allison’s all-time favorite distiller, in Laretto, KY. We visited of course and she got to dip her own bottle in the red wax.

#2. It’s also near 8 other wonderful distilleries that comprise the famous Kentucky Bourbon Trail. (Jim Beam, Four Roses, Evan Williams, Woodford, Town Branch, Buffalo Trace, Wild Turkey.) They have a Passport Program, much like the California wineries do, so of course we had to fill it out with stamps and a visit to each one. We just sent away our completed passports to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail Association and are waiting to receive our free t-shirts. Plus we did some Christmas shopping on the Bourbon Trail, so prepare yourselves family.

#3. Lexington, KY, home of the Wildcats, is just an hour and a half away. (Man these people are nuts about their college sports teams here.) It’s a beautiful walkable downtown with a great nightlife and I think if we were forced to live in Kentucky – that would be our town. Allison took me to Lexington for my birthday this past week and we shared an amazing meal at Dudley’s on Short then walked next door to Parlay Social to hear live music. We ordered a couple of Manhattan’s when we arrived at the club and turns out Allison’s drink “killed” a bottle of Maker’s Mark. Parlay is the only bar in Kentucky to officially count the number of Maker’s Mark bottles they use and so if you “kill a bottle” you get the empty autographed by the owner, the bottle number is recorded and your picture is taken. Once you kill 3 bottles your name goes up on a plaque. Allison just happened to be the lucky killer of two bottles that night (of course she was), so we got a lot of attention from the bar owner and his friend Dave. They ended up paying for our entire tab!

#4. The Campbellsville University Marching Band is fantastic! We live just 10 minutes from campus and we were able to catch a home football game before the season ended. I thought we’d just get some sunshine and watch football, but as we pulled up that day we saw close to 1,000 band uniforms lined up in the parking lot and the drum line was rocking an awesome cadence.

#5. Delicious regional sodas you can only find in Kentucky.

#6. The main branch of the Citizens Bank downtown puts up a 20 foot electric train display in its lobby every Christmas. It has a hobo village with a naked guy in a tub, a drive in movie theater that plays an actual movie, a prison where you can see an inmate on the toilet through the window while another one is trying to escape down a rope from the window above him. There’s a crashed skier’s feet sticking up from the snow on the mountainside at one end and a moonshiner getting busted by the police in the mountains on the other side. They posted videos about it to their Facebook page:

#7. Churchill Downs is just an hour and a half away in Louisville. The Kentucky Derby museum is one of the best I’ve ever been to in terms of interactivity and breath of content. Allison got to call her own race, there’s an entire room full of hats that famous people have worn to the Derby, an exhibit on cocktail recipes, a whole room dedicated to the crazy party that goes on in the center of the track on derby day (including costumes), you can get on a fake horse in the gates, you can try on jockey colors, learn about the art of horseshoes, watch a beautiful movie on a 360 degree 15 foot tall screen that surrounds you and then tour the race track. And of course, betting on the horses is loads of fun as well.

#8. Killer sunsets. There’s no ocean here, but a barn and a silo make a damn nice silhouette in the setting sun.

#9. It snows here, but in the fun, pretty way that doesn’t mess up your ability to drive somewhere.

#10. It’s just so darn quaint with its barn quilts and corn mazes. We’ve been treated so kindly by our campground hosts and we couldn’t have picked a better location to live while we’ve been here. We really lucked into our rural country spot at the Green River Resort. They were booked when we called in September, but we visited them the day after we arrived just to see if anything had changed and sure enough someone had cancelled THAT MORNING. So we got their spot – site #3 – Our Lucy Home – October 25, 2013 – December 21, 2013.

So farewell little Campbellsville! I doubt we will EVER see you again since you’ll notice the glaring omission of our jobs from this list of favorite things. You were a swell hometown (for a little while).