Bluegrass/Country

This past weekend, we traveled down to Lexington, Kentucky for the wedding of our friends Rachel and Jonathan. We stopped in Louisville last year around this time to use the bathrooms at the Louisville Slugger Museum (very nice, btw), and we enjoyed visiting Mammoth Cave later on the same trip, but all the same, we were skeptical of what Kentucky might have to offer this duo of Yankee elitists. To skip ahead of what could have been an almost unending string of further foreshadowing, boy were we wrong. In only three days, we were exposed to a panoply of wonder, from the sheer insanity of Marylou Whitney's personal satellite branch of the Smithsonian (featuring her deliriously grand dollhouses)--no seriously, this place is part of the Smithsonian--to the pastoral splendor of the Northern Kentucky countryside (tobacco leaves are so pretty, yet so deadly!).

The highlight, though (besides the wedding itself, which was lovely--or, measuring by Jeff's standards, no runaways, and the beer was free), was our private tour of Claiborne Farm, the famed birthplace and resting place of Secretariat (to name just one of the Horses We Had Previously Heard Of who were associated with this place)-- made possible by our friends Jim and Miranda, who accompanied us. After standing awkwardly in the rubber-floored barn where more than 20 Kentucky Derby winners were conceived (yeah, that kind of conceived), we got to see the pens where some of the most successful racehorses (and the most prodigious studs) in history slept.


We even got to meet a couple of horse-world stars up close and personal!

Eddington and Miranda

Amanda and First Samurai

Suffice to say, we were positively giddy as we drove home across the rolling hills. Jeff even gave Kentucky the ultimate compliment, peeling his eyes away from the glowing fuel consumption display on the Prius to gaze at the passing scenery.