12th June – 17th Jun 2023
A few hours cruising west through Kentucky brought us to the oddly named town of Bowling Green. This city of 80,000 people is the third largest in Kentucky after Louisville and Lexington and is best known as ‘Home of the Corvette’. Production of America’s best loved sports car has happened here since the assembly plant opened in 1981 and it has produced over 1 million of the 1.5 million Corvettes ever made. You can pay to do a factory tour of the plant and there is a museum. So of course we were stopping here. We stayed locally the night prior and headed off to the factory the next morning.
The rules for the tour were simple: wear closed toed, flat shoes and bring nothing with you: no bags, no cameras, no phones. After arriving, walking a considerable distance from the carpark to the entrance and checking in, we were given eye protection and an audio tour receiver and sat in a waiting area. Here a wall of large screens gave us our safety briefing and then our group of about 10 were taken into the factory. This was not a tour from behind glass windows or up on balconies above the action, this was a walking tour of the actual factory floor and it was fantastic. Partly it was interesting because the Corvette is now actually a half decent sports car (after the lows of the 80s/90s & 00s) and it was great to see it take shape from all its various components, but mostly the tour was so good because of the experience of being so up close and personal with a modern factory production line.
The factory has a current target of 94 cars per day and each shift in each zone has its live stats visible on a board. Each car takes about 65 hours to manufacture and this includes the painting and curing of the body panels. The place is an absolute ballet of slowly moving production lines – both floor level and overhead – humans fitting parts, robots fitting parts, robots delivering parts around the floor, humans driving forklifts to deliver parts around the floor. Body panels for each car are sprayed together in the new $450 million paint shop, then after curing are split up and transported to all different corners of the factory to be reunited on the same car at various stages of the build. The computers know which car has which different options and these are all perfectly assigned to each vehicle along the line. The technology was incredible. It was also strangley quiet and no-one needed any hearing protection. There was one amusing analogue safety feature. The corners of the windscreen frames of the cars have a small sharp nubbin on them and the workers were hitting their heads on them as they bent over to fit items into the car’s dashboard area. At great expense, the Chevrolet engineers designed a special cap to clip onto the nubbin, but it kept falling off. The solution? A tennis ball with a cut fits perfectly. The factory gets these as seconds from a tennis ball factory and all are happy. As you might expect, a lot of Corvette owners come to see the factory and the carpark was heaving with shiny, sporty machines and if you have ordered a Corvette you can come and do a VIP tour to see your actual car being made. If you want to come and collect your new car yourself, rather than have it delivered, then you can collect it from the museum site where they do a full handover. All very exciting. We went over to the museum after our tour, saw the things and read the blurb. It was good, but not a patch on the tour. We saw a few of the cars being handed over and then watched this guy drive off in his new pride a joy.
Next stop: Mammoth Caves National Park. Two nights in a quiet camp run by a religious couple where the rules specified: discrete alcohol drinking only and no bare chests or beach wear. This set us up for a visit to the caves on our middle day. We couldn’t be bothered to off load Tin Can for our 8 mile drive to the park’s visitors centre so we just unplugged and all went together. The cave system here is enormous and formed by underground rivers dissolving the soluble limestone. It is the biggest cave system in the world, with over 400 miles of mapped caves. We booked onto a cave tour which took us underground for a 2 hour, 2 mile guided walk with lots of historical facts and figures from our two rangers (who were both called Kelly). I kept my mild claustrophobia at bay and knew that I certainly wouldn’t have been exploring these caves 150 years ago with just an oil lamp and a laissez faire attitude towards safety. No sir.
And onward we rolled to Louisville, Kentucky’s biggest city with a population of approx 630,000. In fact our roost was to be across the Ohio River, in Clarksville, which was actually Indiana. From here it was an easy 3 mile cycle along a riverside path and then over the river on an old railway bridge which has been repurposed as a pedestrian and cycle crossing, then into the riverside park on the Louisville side. This was only a short distance from the heart of the historic downtown of Louisville and several key areas of interest for us: Bourbon, Baseball and Bats.
All bourbon is American. 95% of bourbon is made in Kentucky and 40% of Kentucky bourbon is made in Louisville. This is the heart of the operation! The water here sourced from underground aquifers and is particularly tasty. We had booked onto a tour of a distillery called Angel’s Envy and headed there on the bikes once we had set up camp. (I have said it before and I will say it again…it is such a joy to be able to cycle safely into and around a city!) The tour was very good. All brewing, distilling and bottling happens there on site, with only the barrel maturation happening elsewhere. We had a taster of the rough corn mash beer brew-complete with chewy bits and a proper tasting at the end. I learnt a lot and actually have acquired a taste for bourbon. Well the good stuff, at least.
We obviously had to have a bourbon cocktail at their bar before we left and had to buy a bottle of the brew to take home. Of course! On the way home we stopped on the Indianna side of the river for dinner at a brewery. This had a great view of Louisville and its bridges and served a good burger. It also served us a jug of full strength IPA when we had ordered a lighter, lower alcohol one. That explained why it had tasted so good and why my head was a little fuzzier than expected in the morning. I should sue!!
The next day we hoofed it back across the river again and having parked up the bikes we strolled the historic main street. This is dubbed ‘Bourbon Row’ as many of the distilleries have a presence here. Our strolling took us down to the museum and factory of another famed export of Louisville: The Slugger baseball bat. Another tour was attended and again, we learned stuff. The Slugger bat makes up 15% market share for the MLB. They make about 1.8 million bats annually, 3000 of which are made in the factory here. That was suprising to us as the factory seemed to be awfully quiet and unproductive whilst we were looking round. After the tour we both got a free ‘mini bat’ which are too small to be useable and too big to be practical souvenirs. I carried them around for the rest of the day, like every other tourist in town.
The latter part of our afternoon was spent in the shade outside a nice bar slowly eating a meal and drinking weak ‘happy hour’ beer whilst we waited for the evening’s entertainment: a baseball game. Our thouroughly pleasant sojourn was was slightly marred by a father and son who were standing on the street just near our table, drinking beer out of cans and smoking big fat cigars, by virtue of the venue being smoke-free. This we could tolerate. But the spitting. So much spitting. One drag of cigar…One spit. We couldn’t see the ground where they were aiming it, but there must have been a pool of it developing. If there had been ducks they would be paddling on it. Surely a cigar shouldn’t trigger such waterbrash, and if it does, just swallow the flaming stuff. Or ditch the habit, it’s obviously not agreeing with you. Rant over.
To the baseball. The local team are called the ‘Louisville Bats’. Bats for the Sluggers homage and the mascot is….yes…a bat. The small furry winged type. The team play in the minor leagues but have a great little stadium in the heart of the historic district. They were in the middle of a week of games against the St Paul Saints. We bought tickets (The slightly fancier ones with padded seats, upper tier, access to air conditioned bar.) and took our seats at 7pm in time for the anthem. This was belted out by an 11 year old girl who did a much better job than many a well known artist. Now baseball itself is fairly boring, which is why they serve beer and snacks, but our view was great and a ball did fly very close to our heads at one point. which was a bit exciting. After sitting through 2 hours and 7 innings by which time the score was still 1-1, we bailed. Partly due to boredom, partly due to the fact that dusk had arrived and we had no bike lights. Our route home initially took us past ‘Funk Fest’, a music event in full swing on the riverside park. Hundreds of people had paid the $65 for a ticket to get in, but thousands of others had just pitched up with lawn chairs to sit outside the venue and listen from the nearby park, bringing their own private parties with them. It was quite a spectacle. We had noted that the baseball crowd had lacked Black faces. Here they were, having a much better time, for free! Sensible people. We stopped for a few moments to listen to ‘Slick Rick’ but as darkness waits for no man, we pushed on. The rail bridge was lit up with colourful lights and the city looked great behind us. We cruised home, marveling at the displays from the fireflies along the riverside, trying not to swallow the myriad of other bugs that were out in force, arriving back safely before it was pitch black.
