Kentucky

The weather was Indian Summer and the trees were ablaze with fall colors. As is our custom, we took the blue highways through the small towns, and were charmed by Kentucky's winding country roads.

I visited the very house where legendary Bluegrass founder Bill Monroe grew up, and heard stories of his brothers and sisters, parents and uncle, the instruments they played, and the music the family made together.

Then the Kentucky Repertory Theater sucked me in. They were doing Amadeus, the Peter Schaffer play which I had never seen, from which the 1984 movie was made, the movie I loved. So I went to see their production and loved it too, so different from the movie, excellent in its own way, and a production that could hold its head high in the Twin Cities.

We stayed a few days in Owensboro, a medium-small town isolated from the interstate highways and therefore our kind of place. The people were friendly, the traffic was light, the restaurants were pleasing. I visited the Unitarian church on Sunday morning and joined them for lunch afterward. I learned that, decades earlier, GE had had a big plant there which manufactured vacuum tubes for radios and TVs. Today, no tubes in radios, no GE plant in town.

Toyota builds Camrys in Kentucky, and I visited their factory. The tour was impressive, led by a PR pro who knew all about everything and took us around in the kind of tram you ride from the parking lot at the state fair. Each of us wore a $300 Sennheiser wireless headset to hear the tour's narration. We watched teams of workers assemble the cars and learned about the Toyota way of doing things. The factory was so spacious that there was plenty of room for our tram to drive through the assembly areas. It was a very pleasant experience, and I came away with admiration for Toyota and the way it runs its business.

A couple of days later I visited the Chevy Corvette factory, and the contrast was remarkable. Our tour leader was an intern from the local college who had some basic training but no depth of knowledge about the company, the car, or the operations. There was no tram — the factory was too crowded — so we had to walk around the plant. There were no earphones; the guide occasionally shouted something over his shoulder, which we couldn't hear. I learned very little about how Corvettes are made, but did come away with an impression of the way GM runs its business.

The final factory tour was at the Wild Turkey plant where they make Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey. The whole tour was quite informal, and our guide let us lean over the edge of huge vats and see the fermentation bubbles on the surface of the corn mash. The two-step fermentation, lasting a few days, was completely computer controlled, requiring only one person sitting at a computer monitor. Of course, the aging in oak barrels takes years, and most of the buildings were full of those barrels.

Kentucky has so many interesting places to visit! I ate lunch at Colonel Sanders' original cafe and museum, where he perfected his famous blend of eleven herbs and spices. He successfully ran this cafe for years before he started selling franchises and appearing in his white suit and string tie. I visited a state museum gallery honoring Duncan Hines, who recommended restaurants in the 1950s before he started his line of cake mixes.

We liked Kentucky and were enjoying it a lot, but further sightseeing was cut short by a particularly severe cold front sweeping down from Minnesota, so we fled south clear across Tennessee and Alabama with frigid temperatures nipping at our heels. We reached the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile, Alabama and watched the weather reports of temperatures in the teens where we had just been. But here on the coast the warm water kept the temperatures quite pleasant.