Shepherdsville, KY, the Monarch Challenge, and Museum Minis

Good morning, my friends. We've moved on down the road this morning. We're in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, which is just about 20 miles from Bardstown, Kentucky. This is where Mike gets to check a few things off his bucket list, starting with the bourbon distilleries. So, I'll tell you about our plans for the area in a bit, but let's go back to where yesterday started. 

We were in no hurry to leave the previous spot, and that gave me plenty of time to work on my slow-stitching yesterday morning. I filled my hoop.

From there, I moved my hoop to the left, and that's where I'll start when I pick it up again.

It was a short and boring drive yesterday...except for the poor folks we saw whose car was burning up right before their eyes. They were on the opposite side of the road, and they'd gotten their belongings out of the car. The man was talking on a cell phone by the side of the road, while the car was being engulfed in flames. Yikes. Better you than me, man. Except for that, the road looked like this pretty much the whole distance.

There were barns along the way, but barely enough openings between the trees for me to catch any of them. I did get this one.

Also, we crossed into the Eastern Time Zone yesterday. You'll probably want to reset your watch if you want to go with us on the distillery tour.

In my Google inquiries about towns we passed through, there wasn't much to report, except for this: When we passed through Princeton, Kentucky, I learned about Mabel Stark, whose real name was Mary Ann Haynie. She was a renowned tiger trainer of the 1920's and was referred to as one of the world's first women tiger trainers/tamers. In its belated obituary, The New York Times lauded her as "one of the most celebrated animal trainers in a field dominated by men." That's her in the image below:

We passed by many fields of yellow flowers. This is probably a crop...either mustard or rapeseed.

As we approached our final destination, we passed by one of the Jim Beam distilleries. We'll tour one of their plants today, although I'm not sure which one it will be.

Our campground next-door neighbor has already toured the wineries, and he gave Mike the skinny on all the distilleries he'd visited. As it turns out the Jim Beam tour will appeal to the engineer in Mike. Tomorrow we'll tour the Maker's Mark distillery, and we're told it's a beautiful distillery that will appeal more to our artistic senses.

For dinner last night, I tried something new. These are Leftover Blue Cheese Chicken Salad Sandwiches. It seems I'm almost always trying to use up leftover blue cheese, and I happened to have some when I came across this recipe. It was a perfect way to get that out of our refrigerator. I took a picture of mine, but the one from the recipe was more appetizing.

You can find the recipe at that link I've given you. I used light sour cream in place of the plain yogurt. I already had some chopped green onion, and so I used that in place of the shallot. Other than that, I made it pretty much as written, and it was a nice light and tasty dinner. We had it with some applesauce on the side.

We're staying at a KOA, which is nice enough, but typical of a KOA. The spaces are close together, and not particularly level. Still, we have a nice patio and table, and the park has two miles of "nature trails." We decided to go for a walk after dinner. The trails will lead either to a Native American shelter, or to the confluence of the Salt River and Floyd's Fork. We chose the latter. It was an easy trail.

If you look at the image above, you'll see we were just about to walk between two shrubs with these flowers blooming. My phone tells me this is Great Laurel.

And we saw other flowers along the way too. My phone tells me this is Star-of-Bethlehem.

I had a hard time getting these next ones in focus. They're tiny flowers...smaller than a dime. My phone tells me they are Omphalodes Verna, or Blue-eyed Mary.

It was a relatively short walk to the rivers' confluence.

Looking to my right was Floyd's Fork.

And check out this tree hanging on for dear life.

The main channel here was the Salt River...not the one from Arizona.

Also, we saw these Red Admiral butterflies flitting around. I couldn't capture any of them, but I found this picture online.

(Image credit: "Red Admiral - Butterfly" by naturalengland is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.)

As I'm writing this Sadie is having a luxurious sun bath. We don't often get the morning sunshine, but it's her favorite part of traveling.

So that brings you up to date on current events. Let's return to the quilt show. I have some more pictures for you. I'm ending the quilt show with this "Monarch Challenge." This was a Cherrywood challenge, and I enjoyed seeing the ones that were posted to Facebook last year. That made it even more fun to see them in person. This was the one part of the show where the quilts were hanging against a flat wall on one side of the room. It was not so crowded there, and so I was able to get a good look at them. If you're not familiar with the Cherrywood challenge, here's a little blurb about that:

And there were lots of these extending from one side of the room to the other. 

I only took pictures of my favorites, and now you can see them too:

This next photo is a detail of the one above. I like the use of gold beads on the chrysalis.

That brings me to the end of the pictures I took at the show. The next images are from the museum. These are all the most incredible minis I've ever seen.

Can you believe these tiny pieces?

Right beside it was this one:

This one, because of the way the pieces fanned out, had a three dimensional appearance.

Just amazing. I love these quilts. I despair of ever starting one for fear I'd have to slit my own throat before I could finish.

These next ones were also minis. I just thought they were interesting.

Okay, so I still have more pictures to show you from the museum, and I'll want to show you the murals before we leave our discussion of Paducah. But that's enough for today. 

I've developed a painful left hip for some who-knows-why reason. The same thing happened when we made our trip back to West Virginia a couple of years ago, but it was the other hip. My own theory is that it's from sitting in the truck and riding over rough roads. The shape of the seat might be putting pressure on my hip. In any case, it was so painful last night, I barely got any sleep. I'm still gimping around this morning. Sitting and lying down are the most painful. Walking and standing aren't too bad, and so I should be good for the tour today and tomorrow. I'm trying different over-the-counter analgesics, and it feels better now that I've been up and around. I'm hopeful it will improved, because this level of pain sucks.

So I'll leave you with that happy thought, and I'll be back tomorrow to tell you about the distillery and with more pictures from the museum. For now, I'm going to go back to bed for a little bit. Have a good day, everyone.