Louisville Fun

A couple weeks ago, my boyfriend and I took a mini-vacation to Louisville, Kentucky. We were headed up there to see Wilco and Neko Case perform at the Forecastle Music Festival (which was really amazing!), but also ran into some pretty nice side adventures as well. If you want to hear some “deeper” musings about my trip, read “The Girl in the Crowd,” which is about the lesson I learned about confidence and true beauty.

Sunday morning, Tye picked me up at my father’s house and we got on the road. It was a four-and-a-half hour drive, which isn’t too terribly long. One of my summer bucket list ideas was to have a road trip, so that definitely counted! Mission: accomplished.

We did get lost once. Tye has a hard time navigating, so he asked me, “Do I get over to the right?” Yes, we were supposed to, but he ended up taking some obscure exit and we drove around Nashville for twenty minutes, finally asking a maid at a motel how to get back onto the interstate.

When we got to Louisville, we immediately got lost again! The GPS wasn’t very reliable and even took us down a dead end in the ghetto. Finally, we stopped at an office building to ask how to get to the Waterfront Park, where the music festival was. While the building was closed, there were some maintenance guys hanging out in the back. Tye asked how to get there, and one of the guys jerked his thumb to the right. Boom, we were about one hundred yards away. So embarrassing.

We finally made it to the park, got in, and I was astounded! There were so many booths full of art, posters, band shirts, so many food vendors. The food was all very good, mostly organic, homemade, or vegetarian. I loved being in that kind of environment! The park offered free refills on water; you just had to bring or purchase your own refillable bottle. It was extremely hot, so that definitely came in handy.

Neko and Wilco were the two shows I wanted to see the most. There were five stages in the festival and the two shows were playing on the same one right after one another. Neko Case at 7:30, Wilco at 9:30. During the day, we walked around to the other stages, hearing reggae, rock, and one awesome live-mixing house/dubstep group.

About halfway through the day, Tye couldn’t find his keys. He’d locked them in the car! So we called a locksmith and sat around in the heat for over an hour. Being the baby that I am, I got really whiny and started complaining. My attempts to unlock the car were unsuccessful, which added to my frustration. The locksmith finally got there and we were able to enjoy the rest of the day, including Neko and Wilco’s shows.

Forecastle definitely has a wonderful atmosphere. There were so many wonderful art exhibits, I didn’t know where to look! One thing I really enjoyed was the resident puppeteer company. This group of talented puppeteers had amazing puppets; fish, a giant wolf-man, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington They would walk through the crowds, taking pictures, entertaining. During the Neko show, the giant fish puppets were paraded around, making the crowd “ooh” and “aah.” Even Neko herself pointed them out!

When Jeff Tweedy, lead singer and guitarist for Wilco, walked onto the stage, I lost my mind. I screamed and almost cried. I was so excited! Wilco is my very favorite band (right before the Wombats), and I couldn’t believe I was seeing him live. He had a very high-pitched voice with a Northern accent. I didn’t expect that! It wasn’t as noticeable in the documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” which was about the making of Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

On the ride home on Monday, Tye stopped in Elizabethtown because he’d seen it in a movie. We walked around the square, seeing an interesting antique shop we wanted to duck into. A sign on the door said, “Use next door.” So naturally, we walked to the next door. We opened it; it was unlocked…there was a flight of green, wooden stairs. We ascended them. At the top, there were two doors. It looked like an apartment building, but there were “Welcome!” signs everywhere, plus a welcome mat, so we thought the store wanted you to know that it was, indeed, a store. Oh no.

I knocked on the door, tried to turn the knob…it was someone’s apartment. I was mortified. Tye and I flew down the stairs without a backwards glance. The shop owners had conveniently forgotten to mention the door in between the two shop doors, the second one being the right one. The shop was interesting, but the giggles we had were even better.

I hope you all get the chance to visit Forecastle; it’s a wonderful, eventful music festival, and we were only there for one day!