While in Kentucky doing the Bourbon Trail, my friend Devon and I decided to squeeze in some other attractions in Kentucky as well. My last post went in detail about the ten distilleries we visited on this trip so I’m not going to talk about them here. You can check out the itinerary for the daily break-down, but here are other things to do if you visit Kentucky when you aren’t sipping on bourbon.
NATURAL BRIDGE
We drove to Kentucky from Maryland (about an eight hour drive) and headed to spend the night at the Natural Bridge State Resort Park. A few years ago, we drove past the Virginia Natural Bridge and Devon said that the one in Kentucky was really cool, so that was on our road trip agenda early on. There aren’t very many hotels to stay at in that area, so the Natural Bridge State Resort Park Lodge has a monopoly. It was pretty pricey to stay there (and they don’t even include breakfast) but it was fine and worth waking up right there and getting a start on our plans for the day.
You can either hike up to the Natural Bridge or take the skylift up. I believe the hike takes a couple hours so in the interest of time, we took the skylift. The Natural Bridge is a bridge formed naturally from sandstone over a period of more than a million years. It’s 78 feet in length and 65 feet high.
The best part about the bridge is the surrounding area. It’s located in the Red River Gorge, which is part of the Daniel Boone National Forest. You drive through a tunnel to enter the gorge and there are tons of hiking trails, not very clearly marked, though. We were driving around for awhile to find one of the famous “hikes” for Chimney Top Rock. It actually only ended up being a five minute walk to the overlook, but definitely a beautiful view.
We had to get back on the road to get started on Bourbon drinking or else we would have done some more hiking. But first, we had to get some Kentucky roadtrip snacks. Ale 8-One is a popular ginger ale drink in Kentucky and I had to try some pulled sugar candy. So good.
LEXINGTON
Lexington is an hour drive from the Natural Bridge Resort Park. The main thing we did here other than Bourbon tastings is have dinner at the Kentucky Castle. The Kentucky Castle was originally constructed by a real estate developer who was inspired by German architecture after his trip to Europe in 1969. But the developer and his wife divorced several years later, leaving the castle unfinished. It is now an inn and restaurant. Of course it is also often used for weddings, most recently for the wedding of Jax and Brittany from Vanderpump Rules, which I was excited about, but that wasn’t the reason we went there. Devon always drove by and wanted to have dinner there so we did.
We also walked around downtown a bit. The part I liked the most of Lexington was driving through Versailles. Surrounded by over 400 horse farms, Lexington is the Horse Capital of the World. In Versailles, you pass picturesque views of beautiful farms and countless horses. This area looked to me like the prettiest spot in Kentucky. The horse racing track, Keeneland, is located around this area and is known as America’s most beautiful race track.
LOUISVILLE
Louisville is about an hour and a half drive from Lexington. We happened to be in Louisville when Churchill Downs (the track used for the Kentucky Derby) was having weekend spring horse racing. It was a lot of fun spending the afternoon at the track even though all of the horses we picked to win miserably failed. We ended up getting free tickets from the shuttle driver who drove us from the parking lot so that was awesome. Although when we got inside, I asked where the famous horse statue was and it was outside the gate! So we had to go back out to find the statue and then convince them to let us back in.
The paddock was close to the betting booth, which was convenient. All of the other paddocks I’ve seen are way far away so its hard to check out the horses then go all the way to the other side of the park to make your bet. I also had my first mint julep that came in a Kentucky Derby glass.
I wanted to eat any and all Kentucky food during this trip, so Devon suggested a Kentucky Hot Brown. This is a hot open faced sandwich of turkey and bacon, covered in Mornay (cheese) sauce then baked until the bread is brown and covered with tomatoes. The original hot brown sandwich was created at The Brown Hotel in Lexington, so that’s where we went to have it.
The downtown area seemed cute but we didn’t have a lot of time to check it out. A lot of people were headed to the Cardinals game when we were there. Louisville is located right across the bridge from Indianapolis. We actually drove over the bridge to Indianapolis just for the sake of going to another state.
MAMMOTH CAVES
Mammoth Cave National Park is about an hour and a half drive from Louisville and well worth the drive. You can only really go inside the cave with a tour and tours get booked up quickly so you should probably purchase a tour online well in advance. I really wanted to do a lantern tour, where you go through in the dark with just lanterns, but those tours were all booked up when I looked at them about 3 weeks before my trip so we just went with the “Domes and Dripstones” tour. There are also really in depth caving options where people can crawl through little fairly accessed places on the tour while wearing headlamps.
Mammoth Cave is the longest underground cave system in the world with 400 miles explored. I’ve been to Luray Caverns before in Virginia, which I liked, but Mammoth Cave really makes those look like just a tiny room in comparison. To start, you descend a couple hundred feet down below. I would recommend booking a tour first thing in the morning or trying to find a tour with a smaller cap of people because it would probably be a lot more fun without so many people following along.
Many people will book several tours in one day, but we just did the one since we had limited time. Since we were road-tripping, it would probably have made more sense to drive a couple of hours towards home since we had a ten hour drive back to Maryland the next day, but we stayed at the hotel at the park which was a nice little place. The park also had a restaurant for dinner.
So those were the best things to do in Kentucky as recommended by my Kentucky native friend. She also said another thing that would have been cool to check out is Cumberland Falls, which is a waterfall that often offers a moonbow (rainbow in the night sky). Kentucky was a lot of fun and definitely worth a visit!
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