Louisville Slugger Museum and American Printing House for the Blind (Fri.)

Today was another full day of sightseeing in Louisville.  Our first stop was the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory tour.  They turn out between 2000 and 5000 wooden bats here each day for professional and recreational ball players, plus an additional 4000-5000 mini bats.  The bats are made from white ash and maple trees.  Ideal trees for bats are at least 80 years old.  They start with a "billet," which is French for "trunk of tree."  We got a tour through the factory and got to watch some of the processes, and our tour guide passed several different bats through the group for us to hold.  We were not allowed to take photos during the factory tour, but as we left the building I got the third picture through the window, which overlooks the street.  The first bat was made here in 1884. 

The museum has lots of bats from famous players.  John and Bridgette recently attended a Tampa Bay game, so I took a picture for them.

My favorite section was the "Big Red Machine," the bats of Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan from the championship days of the Cincinncati Reds, which we followed back in the mid-70s.  Pete Rose was always my favorite baseball player.

We watched a short film (made me want to go out to watch a baseball game) and then walked through an area designed like a locker room, and then Joe sat on the bench in the dugout.

In addition to the museum, a temporary exhibit called "Big Leagues Little Bricks" is here until September.  This exhibit is baseball stadiums, bats and players all made out of legos.  It was amazing!

This next one is Wrigley Field, which used 57,960 legos.

Outside this building, at the entrance is a HUGE baseball bat, and embedded in the next building is a baseball.  We each got a mini bat for taking the tour, so Shooter will now have his first bat.

It was raining when we came out of this museum, and we headed to the car to drive around a little in the old downtown area, then we headed out to drive along the river.  Joe was determined to find the River Drive, and he did.  They have a beautiful walking bridge here call "Big 4 Bridge," and every time we've passed it we've seen people walking and biking across it, even in the rain.  We just admired it from afar.

We passed some nice parks on this drive, two marinas, some very nice real estate, and soccer fields that had irrigation pivots on them.  We thought that might be a good idea for Arizona.

We came upon a historic water tower that caught our eye, so we drove back to it.

We finally turned around and headed to our next destination, the American Printing House for the Blind      (APH).  This was an amazing place, and made us realize some of the obstacles the blind encounter.  This is the world's largest publisher of books for the visually impaired, and they do both Braille and enlarged print, two totally different concepts for the blind. This company was started in 1858, and it took them 6 years to complete their first book, due to the civil war.  That first production had a print run of 400 copies.   In 1959, APH completed a 142-volume edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, the largest Braille project ever undertaken.

Our tour guide gave us some history of APH and showed us quite a collection of tools for the blind.  Then we got to walk through the actual "factory."  There were not too many people working today, but we saw a few running some machinery, and some proofreaders working.  For proofreading, the blind person actually reads to the sighted person.  The Kentucky School for the Blind is right next door, and it looked like a pretty big campus.  The APH building is huge.  I think she said it had been added on to 14 times.

They had several different globes, all topographical so the kids could "feel" the mountains.  I thought this one was really nice.


Also on display was the piano Stevie Wonder (Steveland Morris) used when he attended the Michigan School for the Blind.

Our timing here was very fortunate.  Unbeknownst to us, they only give tours at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., and we got here at 1:55.  The tour lasted about 1 1/2 hours, then we wandered through their museum which held a lot of equipment from their early days.  At the end of the tour, we got to type our names on a Braille machine.  Braille is really just a set of raised dots, and their position determines what letter the dots represent.  I typed "Wilma," but Joe had to go all out and typed "David Froeschke," so he got to use up most of the alphabet!

This was a very interesting place and we learned a lot.  They had some goggles fixed up with different eye conditions so you could "see" what someone with that condition (glaucoma, macular degeneration [MD], etc.) sees, so we looked through the MD ones to get an idea of what Lucille deals with all the time. 

We left here about 4:30, tired and hungry.  We headed back across the river and found a Mexican restaurant, Senor Iguana, for dinner.  It was delicious; in fact Joe thought it was one of the best pork burritos he had ever eaten. 

But we were not done for the day yet.  We have been looking for a new cell phone for me, and we had passed a Verizon store in our search for dinner, so we went over there and talked to them.  Then called Eric for his thoughts on smart phones.  Then we went across the street to Best Buy, and ended up with 2 new smart phones, one for each of us.  We still are pretty sure we are not smart enough for smart phones, but we are going to try them.  We had excellent help there, and Felice Tempo, are sales guy who set us up with the new phones, was really great.  I'm sure we tried his patience almost to the breaking point.  Either that, or he's our new best friend.

We were there almost 2 hours, and by the time we drug ourselves home, we were both exhausted.  I went straight to bed because I knew it would be aggravating to try to figure out the new phones and I was too tired to even think about it, but Joe messed with his for a while.  So if no one hears from us for a few days, it will be because we don't know how to make a call.  We hope we can figure out how to answer it if it rings.