THE US KENTUCKY DESTINATIONS
F
rom beneath a distinctly southern, slow drawl I make
out the words “this is where me and Cassius used to sleep”. Rahman Ali, younger brother
of three-time world boxing champion Muhammad Ali, is showing us around their 1940s childhood home-turned-museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and I can’t quite believe it’s happening. Hearing tales from a man
who’d grown up with arguably the world’s greatest-ever boxer – and at a time when civil rights were little more than fantasy – wasn’t exactly something I’d envisaged when I’d set out on my trip to Kentucky. But then neither was venturing
through the earth into the world’s longest cave, winning at the Fall
Meet horse races, or zip-lining 170 feet over the treetops at an 800-acre amusement park. In fact, beyond KFC and the
Derby, I knew almost nothing about this mideastern state, which meant that finding the unexpected came to define my whole trip. And it didn’t take me long to realise that Kentucky had a whole lot more going for it than Colonel Sanders and his 12-piece buckets, or Jim Beam and his bourbon (not that whiskey was left untouched – we sampled nine in a day).
w LOUISVILLE Among the state’s biggest treasures, of course, is Louisville. Set on the Ohio River, it’s a diverse, cosmopolitan city where
Bluegrass has its roots in the
Kentucky has a whole lot more going for it than Colonel Sanders’ chicken buckets or Jim Beam’s bourbon
once-gritty neighbourhoods like ‘NuLu’ have been revitalised into modern hipster havens, and where the skyscrapers of Downtown vibrate with the beat of live music gigs from the Vegas-style entertainment complex Fourth Street Live!
area and it’s not hard to find a venue playing it, but this isn’t quite New Orleans or Nashville. In the day the city is calm, its life focused around Main Street, where 10 visit-worthy museums – including the Muhammad Ali Centre ($9 for adults) – offer up cultural treasures. Bourbon is the real lifeblood of the city, though, which is perhaps unsurprising given that 95% of the world’s produce is made in the state. I can’t say I’m a bourbon connoisseur – a sentiment my facial expressions may have given away – but three distilleries in a day certainly went some way to converting me. The Jim Beam distillery here is huge, with informative
15 December 2016
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