Kentucky Touring

On Sunday, I drove down through Kentucky, just to get an idea what the countryside my great-great-great-grandfather fought in looked like.

I was a little disappointed to find that Kentucky south of Cincinnati along I-75, at least as far south as I took it, was like a lot of other newly built parts of America. I could have been in west Boise, the suburbs of Raleigh, or many San Francisco Bay Area suburbs, at least with respect to the architecture.

When I moved a few miles away from the interstate, however, it started to get character--the kind of places that I have always imagined when hearing Elvis Presley sing "Kentucky Rain":

Showed your photographs
To some old, gray bearded men
Sitting on a bench
Outside a general store
They said, "Yes, she's been here"
But their memory wasn't clear
"Was it yesterday?
No wait, the day before."

~ * ~ * ~

Finally got a ride
With a preacher man who asked,
"Where you bound on such a cold, dark afternoon?"
As we drove on thru the rain
As he listened I explained
And he left me with a prayer
That I'd find you

~ * ~ * ~

Kentucky rain keeps pourin' down
And up ahead's another town
That I'll go walkin' thru
With the rain in my shoes
(rain in my shoes)
Searchin' for you
In the cold Kentucky rain
In the cold Kentucky rain

You get to share in the experience as I wandered up along the south shore of the Ohio River!

This video I shot with the HP PhotoSmart E427. Considering the limitations of video mode on what is really a cheap digital camera--and that I was holding in one hand while driving with the other--it came out rather better than I expected. This is at 2x the actual speed.

I'll post some more pictures and video later.

UPDATE: Here's a picture of the Ohio River looking north from Kentucky, and a sign detailing a tragedy that took place there in 1868. The sentence about "The AMERICA rammed deeply into the UNITED STATES" almost sounds like a metaphorical description of the Civil War, doesn't it?


Click to enlarge


Click to enlarge