Yay! We're in West Virginia! Let's go half-way across Kentucky. For our first field trip, we met up with Bonnie's rents (short for parents, because... um, yeah) in Louisville, Kentucky!
It's a little over a four hour drive for each of us, so we met there, spent a night in side-by-side hotel rooms, and had a wonderful time!
Papa took Amy to do baptisms for the dead at the Louisville Temple while I took a nap! Then Bonnie and I got to go by ourselves! It was our first evening alone in what feels like a very, very long time!
Unfortunately, and perhaps because we didn't bring the kiddos I didn't think of it, we didn't take even a single picture at the temple! Doh! Well, we had a lovely time together anyway.
Next day before driving back, we went to the Louisville Slugger factory where they make the wood bats for most, if not all, of the professional baseball players! But first, the museum:
Lego replicas of multiple stadiums were impressive!
Ready to hit a home run!
Who's a cutie face?!
The museum was fascinating, holding an immense amount of baseball history. Including this story of Babe Ruth's notched bat. (But we missed a pic of the actual bat! LoL!) Note: H&B stands for "Hillerich & Bradsby," the company that makes the Louisville Slugger bat.
But who cares about history when there's a mitt so big you can climb into it!
I wish I could show you some of the tour, but picture taking's not allowed there. We learned the process from beginning to end--how they select the right trees, how they ship them, how they turn them into billets, the multiple phases of selection, turning only the highest quality billets into bats for MLB, the automatic lathes, the branding, the staining, and more. Some players come and pick their own billets for their own personal baseball bats--baseball players can be extremely superstitious. All in all it was a fantastic tour!
The biggest baseball bat in the world outside the entrance. At 120 feet, I'd have had to go across the street to get the whole thing in the picture, and as is you can barely see the fam! And no, it's not wood. It's made of carbon steel and was hand-painted to look like wood.
After the tour it was time for a late lunch or early dinner. We decided to eat all together before saying goodbye.
Some kids like to hide from pictures. Can you spot them?
To bad you didn't get a chance to visit with Austin and family while in Kentucky. Looks like great fun.
ReplyDeleteWe tried! Just didn't work out this time. :-)
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