Family Vacay 2019

Apparently, everyone on this green Earth has been to Holiday World.  Everyone except for us… until now!

As we planned our trip to visit Holiday World, we did some brainstorming on ideas of other things to do besides the two days dedicated to Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari.  A look at the map proved what we thought might be true– that Louisville was pretty gosh darn close.  One of our favorite cities!!!

So after a quick replacement of an alternator (for real, thank you Todd), we loaded up and headed southeast towards Louisville.  It took me about 35 minutes on the road (you know, just far enough away) to realize what I’d forgotten– our pool bags.  Luckily, I’d packed Todd’s trunks in his suitcase and a spare pair for each boy in their suitcases.  Which meant we were missing towels but I was the only one missing swimwear.  Sigh.  I decided right then and there (approximately Carlyle) that if that was the worst of it, we ended up okay.  (Note: shopping for a quick swimsuit replacement for me did, in fact, suck.)

We made it to Louisville at lunch time, which means we got to really start vacation at me and Todd’s favorite restaurant: Doc Crow’s.  They have an awesome atmosphere, phenomenal cocktail and bourbon list, great food, and stellar service.  It might sound ridiculous to say it’s hard to find a real mint julep around home, but it really is a task.  Having kids with us was definitely different but the restaurant still did not disappoint.  Four years ago in the same span of days, we sat at Doc Crow’s with friends and watched the Louisville Fire Department battle the big Whiskey Row fire.   Nothing that exciting this time around!

From lunch, we headed to tour a distillery that we’ve never been to: Stitzel-Weller.  It was an okay experience, although they do not actually distill at that location anymore.  They are currently responsible for the brands Bulleit, I.W. Harper, and Blade & Bow.  The kids hung in there okay, but had to be reminded that the next two days would be all about them so they needed to suck it up for us in Louisville.  The tour ended with a tasting, as every tour should!

After our scheduled tour with Stitzel-Weller, we did a hop back into downtown to stop in at Old Forester although we were too late in the day to get an official tour (damn you time change).  It’s still always fun to look around.  The boys really just wanted to get to the hotel, so the rest of our day was checking into the hotel and dinner on Fourth Street.

On Tuesday morning, we had an hour drive to get to Holiday World which wouldn’t be opening until 10 a.m.  We took our free morning as an opportunity to visit the Louisville Fire Department, home a real tiller truck.  These apparatus are pretty unusual and none of us had seen one outside of a book, so it was fun to check it out.  Tiller trucks are designed to make super sharp turns with a long truck, so in addition to the person driving the truck, there’s actually a person steering the back end of the truck also.  The firefighters who visited with us were friendly and knowledgeable.  I thought it was very interesting that LFD would have been the oldest fire department in the nation in the 1700s if they could have gotten their you-know-what-together… but instead, they had multiple “fire brigades”, mostly separated by country of origin, who would show up at a fire and fight it out like gangs.  Whoever won the fight got to put out the fire.  Eventually, in 1858, they became an official fire department which marks them as the 3rd oldest in the nation.  They still have 4 fire houses that have the posts out front where the horses would have been tied.  These guys run 24/48 shifts and cover a bunch of specialty rescues: ropes, swift water, confined space, trench.  And they have a sweet 60-foot tiller truck!

The next two days at Holiday World really lived up to the great reputation, minus the 3-minute rollercoaster ride that I thought might kill me (and yes, that 3-minutes was confirmed.  THREE minutes!  Anyone who has run on a treadmill knows exactly how crazy long that is.  Ridiculous. It was The Voyage, if you want to investigate it yourself).  After “sucking it up” to ride that one, since I didn’t want to leave one kid on their own or with a stranger in 2-person seats, I decided I was done sucking it up and they were on their own for any other thrill that I’m not actually capable of.  Otherwise, we rode tons of rides, went down lots of water slides, spent a silly amount of time in the wave pools (yeah, there’s two!), and had fun together.  I left my phone in our locker (duh) so I don’t have many photos BUT Holiday World was definitely a success and we will definitely be back.

Before heading home on Thursday, we made one more stop and visited Lincoln’s Boyhood Home and National Park.  We learned a lot about his years in Indiana, including the loss of his mother and sister, his first job on a ferry boat, and how life would have been on the farm back then.  The visit included a whopping 1-mile hike that instigated way more whining from the kids than I expected after logging 15,000+ steps each day at an amusement park. But it was definitely worth the stop!

Now we have 3 years of official family vacations under out belts: Lake Michigan, Kansas City, and Holiday World.  Time to start thinking of ideas for next year!