Friday, May 22nd

Bourbon Flavoured

Quickly the road shed its extra lanes as it left behind the world of concrete and traffic lights for rural Kentucky. It became narrower and narrower, almost scarily so, and started winding through unreasonably green hills of meadows and tree groves. But civilization wasn’t gone, it just had taken a more relaxed turn of farm yards and cabins. Appropriately, the first town was named Belleview.

The map promised the road to follow the eastern shore of the Ohio River, but instead it insisted to run through the hills and kept away from the river. A sign promised a boat launch down Boat Dock Road. That surely would at least be near the river so I decided to try my luck. But the road ended at a fence and a gatehouse and another sign saying that if you wanted to continue into Boone’s Landing, a five dollar parking fee would be in order. I did not, considering, and returned to the highway.

I was rewarded instantly with Big Bone Lick State Park, named so for the bones of mammoth found here around sulphur springs. The park featured a visitor centre and a number of board walks but, more importantly, a picnic site with a loo.

The river, meanwhile, remained elusive. But eventually the road ran out of hills to hide in and ventured out to the river shore. The happy occasion was marked with a parking lot and lookout. As I parked and looked, a truck stopped for no apparent reason. The driver waved me over pointed to a large white house off a little in the distance by the river shore. ‘Do you know whose house that is?’ he asked. Confused I said that, no, I didn’t, on account of not being from here. He offered a name which I had never heard before. ‘The country singer,’ he added. Not to disappoint, I happily nodded and ah-ed and thanked him and satisfied he drove off.

Sadly, I didn’t remember the name, so you, dear reader, will never know either who lived in that grand white house by the eastern shores of the Ohio just south of Cincinnati.

Having been coerced to the river, the road now meticulously stuck to it. It crossed through Warsaw—first established as Fredericksburg in 1815 and home to a large high school, two banks with drive-thru ATMs, two lawyers, and a library—before arriving at a large dam that marked the end of the pretty and serene landscape. Instead, industriousness started in earnest.

The Ghent Generating Station was first. A giant pile of coal was followed by a giant yellow building complete with five smoke stacks and two rows of small condensers that made it look like steam was rising from the ground. Lots of steam; the repeated fog warning signs weren’t entirely unfounded. A short interruption in the form of the City of Ghent and then three more factories.

Not entirely convinced by this display, I turned left after Carrollton, city of red brick. First I had to cross the Kentucky River on a cute blue girder bridge. The new road followed the Kentucky for a while before venturing into a narrow side valley of forests and nothing much else. Safely away from the river, the landscape started to loose the trees, though, and turned grazing land. The plots were rather small, each fenced off carefully with black wood.

The road passed by Shellbyville with only a minimum number of big box stores. It couldn’t quite avoid advertising boards, either. One announced the McDonald’s Kentucky Burger which featured, of course, a bourbon flavoured sauce since there is nothing else even remotely remarkable about that state (except perhaps fried chicken, but they couldn’t possibly go there). To make up for that, things became almost unreasonably pretty right after.

The road turned narrow again. Almost straight, it crossed through a forest before being forced back to a stark winding alignment by the endless hills. A white wooden farm house stood proud atop such a hill. It head a giant front porch, complete with rocking chairs. Surely, all its rooms were of a particularly impractical layout. On the upper floor, the beams creaked with every step. Out front, an old, light blue pick-up truck was parked under a large tree. The house was surrounded by meticulously cut lawn, the smell of freshly mowed grass still strong in the air. The boundaries of its ground were marked by a shiningly white picked fence. Behind the house was a pond. The heavy branches of trees were shading one of its side while two horses grazed on the other. An buzzard or eagle was circling above, surveying the scene. Across the road, barn and grain silo completed the scene which would mark any writer as hopeless. Yet reality doesn’t care about judgement. To prove it, the next town was named Bloomfield.

In a surprise history lesson, signs started to appear suggesting that Abraham Lincoln was from around here. Indeed shortly after the road entered into a long narrow valley it passed by the great man’s boyhood home. Or one of his boyhood homes, at any rate, for there seemed to be a Lincoln Boyhood National Monument in Indiana. In addition, the place of Lincoln’s birth was a farm of few miles to the south west. Reason enough for Hodgenville, the town at the epicentre of all this to feature a Lincoln Museum in one of the buildings surrounding its town square cum roundabout. Yet before I had even finished considering whether that would be worth a visit I was already out of the rather small town again and half way to the Interstate junction.

I made a quick rest stop there to enjoy some country music being played over the loudspeakers, perhaps even by the very artist whose home I had glimpsed earlier. Apart from the restrooms with grocery store, Subway restaurant, and petrol station, the arrangement also included a real estate agent for some impulse buying.

As I headed west, this became rather less likely. The insane green seemed to be over. The grass finally became a little more brown and here and there even soil shimmered through. There was more grain farming, though still not at any large scale. The hills became less pronounced, too. The forests became larger and the farms less.

Upon leaving Maddisonville, an otherwise unremarkable town, a passing truck managed to throw a stone right into my windscreen. With a disturbing sound, a large mark appeared that, within the next few miles, grew into a crack maybe a foot long. As this was right in front of me, I kept staring at it. Did it keep growing? It surely seemed as if it did very slowly.

In a display of unnecessary drama, I soon passed a hearse followed by a procession of cars all with their hazard lights on. It might have been time to end the day. First, though, I had to get to Paducah. To arrive their quickly, I jumped onto the Interstate motorway. It passed by the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, noted duly by a large array of signs, before crossing the Tennessee River on a large bridge.

I found a hotel a little away from the motorway, had a final judging look at my mangled windscreen and retired for an early night.