After flying back to Indianapolis International Airport after my one-week trip to Seattle, I spent a night at the SpringHill Suites by Marriott Indianapolis Airport/Plainfield then set off to my next destination, Louisville, Kentucky.
I took Interstate 65 south, but the section of the highway that crosses the Ohio River just after Indiana is a toll bridge. In an attempt to save a few dollars on the toll, I decided to take an alternative route and exited onto George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge, another way to get across the Ohio River. What I did not realize was that this would plop me directly at the edge of downtown Louisville.
From this point ensued a 16-minute adventure of sitting in unrealistically narrow lanes, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and gridlock to get through downtown Louisville and back on the toll-free portion of the interstate to continue down southbound towards my hotel near the airport. … I should’ve just paid the few dollars.
I’ve been in Louisville since Thursday, so I’ve had a little bit of time to drive around and get some initial impressions of Louisville.
The first thing I noticed about it was how small it is—it seems like downtown quickly turns into old downtown, which then transitions into the university area, which is right by the airport, and is followed very closely by the wider suburbs. I feel like if I take the distance I would usually drive to get from my condo on the Las Vegas Strip to the edge of Summerlin, that same distance would take me across the entirety of Louisville and put me in the next city over. That was a bit unexpected, because I came to Louisville knowing it was the largest city in Kentucky.
The next thing I noticed is just how old Louisville feels. I’ve been to Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland before, and I’d say that the vibe of Louisville resembles those three states (which I guess makes sense, seeing as Kentucky is a neighboring state, and they’re all part of the older East of the United States).
In the spirit of looking at old things, my first tourist activity was visiting the Conrad-Caldwell House Museum. I had never heard of this before, but the ratings on TripAdvisor were disproportionately high (which I later found out was because the tour guide asks people to leave reviews). I’m not really the biggest fan of history, but for the sake of using my road trip as an opportunity to increase my breadth of knowledge, I purchased tickets online for this museum.
The museum itself wasn’t exactly the best, but I believe a majority of the experience has more to do with the history lesson that the tour guide gives you, as opposed to actually seeing stellar exhibits. The house had weak air conditioning and everything had a fairly musty smell, so I got a headache pretty quickly and lost track of what the tour guide was saying halfway through the tour.
The first room was the parlor, which is apparently the room where everyone used to spend as much money as possible to impress their guests. Honestly, it seems like things haven’t really changed; in the Victorian era, people show off by overdecorating their houses, just like how people show off today on social media by posing with material possessions they cannot afford.
We then moved onto the library.
Apparently the reason this house is named the Conrad-Caldwell House is because those are the only two families that inhabited the property (it was later turned into a retirement home or something, before becoming a museum). Of course, there was some drama with the original family that owned the house, so there were some will conflicts where the house itself was left to one person but all the possessions inside the house was left to another, so the person who possessed the possessions ended up selling everything, and the museum has been working to reacquire the house’s original stuff.
That’s why the library looks so empty—apparently the person who bought the bookcases refuses to sell them back.
Next up was the dining room. There was a funny story about the salt serving containers, as apparently salt was considered a commodity and only the rich would be able to afford to salt their food. Salt was corrosive, so instead of putting real salt in the serving containers for display, they used to put sugar… except it wasn’t actually sugar, it was quartz. The tour guide let us know that she at one point had tasted it out of curiosity (which she was prompted to do so because the grains of sugar were too large to be real sugar), and she let us know that she had just tasted rock.
From here is where my memory started getting a bit fuzzy. I don’t recall anything particularly interesting about these rooms, partially because I was getting a little bored of listening to a history lesson of a family I didn’t know, and partially because I was beginning to drip sweat and get a headache from the odor of the house.
This long ago, there were a lot of ailments and diseases that would end people’s lives early, so death wasn’t really treated with as much gravity as it is today. Apparently post-mortem photography and art was commonplace; this room allegedly had a dead woman propped up against the furniture with her eyes open as if she was still alive, and photographs would be taken of her with her children next to her.
Now that I’m traveling solo again, I don’t have someone else around me all the time to take photos of me, so I included this photo because my reflection is visible in the mirror.
One of the final rooms was the room that the man of the family would use as his office.
Like usual, I’ve been spending the weekend staying at my hotel catching up on work because I don’t want to go to crowded tourist attractions when everyone else is there because they’re off from work. I have a few more places planned for the Monday and Tuesday before my week in Louisville is over and I head out to my next destination.