After a wonderful and actually restful night, the weather was in glorious form for us to make our way toward Illinois.
From our hotel north of Lexington KY, we had a couple of navigational options in play.
The fastest and most efficient would have been to head west toward Louisville and then cross southern Indiana on a direct line for Harrisburg and Marion in Illinois.
There were three reasons why that wasn’t actually what was going to happen.
My main objection to the Louisville routing was that no matter which way through Louisville we’d choose, there was a toll bridge across the Ohio River standing in our way.
Even though two of the three toll collectors we’d encountered on the previous day’s adventure in West Virginia were *NOT* an Excitable Nigerian Chap, the uncertainty of whether the hire car was fitted with a toll transponder or not and risking the ire of an electronic tolling agency was just not worth it.
The next objection was that Mom had previously been through Louisville and was so not a fan of the experience at all.
That left us with the third reason to head southwest toward Paducah along the Western Kentucky Parkway is that it was the far more beautiful and scenic option and we weren’t in any particular hurry to get to Illinois as our meet-up with my cousin Cindy and her husband Ted was many hours away.
Our navigation set, the choice of direction was rewarded almost immediately when the satnav directed us through the downtown section of Georgetown with a main street crammed chock-a-block with some seriously old school Southern architecture homes.
Honestly, we could have spent hours parking and wandering along the street with cameras in hand to admire the immaculately kept up houses and their beautiful designs. Truth be told, we probably would do just that if we visit Georgetown again!
It didn’t take long to clear the downtown area and then some back roads took us into some rural areas very quickly.
If you ever want to see the image of what is in my mind when I think of Kentucky, the pictures of these absolutely gorgeous and *HUGE* horse farms with horses peacefully enjoying the salad beneath their hooves is that image. It’s not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that perhaps the next winner of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs was standing in that pasture as we were passing by.
Miles and miles of these farms guided us to the start of the parkway proper where we were then treated to a delightfully scenic ride through the rolling hills of central and western Kentucky as we made our way to the westernmost tip of the state near where the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers converge in the Little Egypt region.
Our last bit of Kentucky would be Paducah which is right before you get to the bridge that crosses the Ohio into Illinois.
Fun fact…Paducah is the only city in the entire state of Kentucky that has a native American name! It was so named when the town was founded by General William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame!) in honour of a local native chief and his tribe that lived nearby.
