Visiting Louisville, Kentucky

This past May, we visited some friends that recently moved to Louisville, Kentucky! As per my usual, I overwhelmed them with my fast-paced ambitions of hiking and exploring, but everyone had a blast regardless.

We were only there for 3 days, but we managed to do quite a lot of exploring. One of my favorite parts of the trip was going downtown at different times of day and flying my drone around. Whether it was at night by the Big Four Bridge when it was lit up in rainbow colors, sunrise on the coast with the beautiful downtown skyline, or mid-day outside of the stunning Louisville Slugger Field, we had a great time!

Beyond that, we had an absolute blast at a few particular locations:

Rose Island - This park is located in what used to be an amusement park, which now has some interesting remains left to photograph. This location has been on my list for some time just to photograph a series of arches they have in a particular walkway - what can I say, I have a thing for symmetry and repetition!

On the way to Rose Island, we also stumbled into an area that was filled with a bunch of abandoned structures to explore. One section had a series of dozens of cement structures, and to this day we STILL have NO idea what these structures were for. If you have any clue, PLEASE let us know in the comments below.

Bernheim Forest - A must see, this park combines hiking with modern art in an amazing way. You get to explore the park trails while stumbling upon art installations throughout this HUGE 16,000 acres park. They are most known for their Forest Giants, like Little Nis that sits on the edge of a pond.

Jerry’s Junk - One last discovery was a bit sad for me. I had actually been to a spot here in 2013 and captured the below image on the left. For the last 10 years, it has stood as one of my favorite images. I recently researched and found that it was Jerry Lotz who had this collection that was nicknamed “Jerry’s Junk”. Jerry was known as an "avid collector of anything different, unusual or ornery for 75 years". Unfortunately, he passed away in 2019 and I never had the chance to revisit this spot. Well, I used this trip as an opportunity to visit what was left of his legacy. Since Jerry’s death, the items have since been sold, the area repurposed, and it’s now a coffee shop called Pregame Coffee. The image on the right shows the EXACT same image now 10 years later. While much of the structure’s architecture was preserved, it is a rare case of wishing it could have stayed in its original state.

With that being said, please enjoy some of my favorite images from this short trip!

For those that follow my food reviews, of course we enjoyed a number of restaurants while in town. Some favorites include:

• Cast Iron Steak House - Great and affordably priced steaks for sure, but MORE importantly they served amazing bread/butter, and MOST importantly, they had one of the best peach cobblers I’ve ever tried. Seriously - would come back just for that dessert. They mixed in cake batter in pieces so it had that extra buttery and cakey goodness along with super fresh peaches.
• Rubbies - We tried the Louisville famous “The Hot Brown”, which is basically an open-faced turkey sandwich smothered in cheese sauce. It was pretty good. We happened to go to Louisville during the Durby, and we just happened to be at Rubbies, which had the channel set to watch the final race (just a short 60 seconds for all that!).
• Da Lat’s - We tried this restaurant on our last morning, having seen it right next to Rubbies the night before. It was a super cute hole-in-the-wall sort of place. The super sweet chef/owner came out to greet us and gave us a free sample of a sesame ball because they are just that nice. Great boba tea and pastries, too!

Downtown from Above

Forest Giant Little Nis

Riverridge mysterious abandoned structures

Rose Island arches

Falls of the Ohio

Bernheim Forest critter on railing

Heigold House Facade

Pregame Coffee Architecture

Riverridge Abandoned train tracks

Louisville Slugger Field

Bernheim Forest snake!

Riverridge Abandoned powerlines

Panorama along the river

Bernheim Forest silo stage

Riverridge Abandoned structure

Big Four Bridge

Bernheim Forest sensory garden

Jim Beam Bourbon

Shipping Containers

Forest Giant Mama Loumari

Panorama at "Spaghetti Junction"

Bernheim Forest bridge

Downtown at Sunrise

Bernheim Forest bee in edible garden

Belle of Louisville Riverboats

Bernheim Forest visitors center

Bernheim Forest wood art by Mama Loumari

Rose Island abandoned cement wall with moss