Last Updated: August 6, 2026
Louisville sits on the Ohio River and is the largest city in Kentucky. It was founded in 1778 by George Rogers Clark and named after King Louis XVI of France, in thanks for French support during the Revolution. It exists because of the Falls of the Ohio — a two-mile run of rapids that was the only major obstruction on the whole river between Pittsburgh and the Gulf of Mexico. Everything going downstream had to stop and portage, and a settlement grew up around the interruption. That is Louisville.
Kentucky offers something for everyone: outdoor recreation, caves, lakes, state parks and the Appalachian Mountains, plus a heritage built on horses, bourbon and moonshine. For me it is also personal. I did my anesthesiology residency in Louisville and stayed on for a year as an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Louisville, teaching mostly cardiothoracic anesthesia and pain medicine. I miss the place and the people I met there. In the end the weather is what moved me to San Diego — but Louisville will always have a piece of me.
James B. Beam Distilling
Jim Beam is one of the best-selling whiskeys in the world. Jacob Beam sold his first barrel in 1795, and seven generations of Beams have been making whiskey since, interrupted only by Prohibition. The bourbon was called Old Tub for most of that time; the brand was renamed Jim Beam in 1943 in honour of Colonel James Beauregard Beam. In 2014 the company was purchased by Suntory Holdings of Japan, and it has continued to prosper.
The interesting part of that history is the gap. Prohibition closed almost every distillery in Kentucky, and only a handful kept operating under federal licences to produce medicinal whiskey. Beam was not one of them. James Beauregard Beam spent those years in citrus, coal and quarrying, and when repeal came in December 1933 he was pushing seventy. He built a new distillery at Clermont in about four months and started over. His grandson Booker Noe ran the place as master distiller for more than forty years and in 1988 released Booker’s — bourbon straight out of the barrel, uncut and unfiltered, which more or less invented the small-batch category the whole industry now runs on.
They recently did a multi-million dollar remodel of the tasting room and built a restaurant. Their food and drink selection were outstanding, and the restaurant was cosy but contemporary with a lot of windows. We enjoyed a couple of their bourbons on the rocks with a chocolate delicacy called bourbon balls — a delicious pairing, and a genuinely Kentucky one. Bourbon balls were invented in Frankfort in 1938 by Ruth Hanly Booe of Rebecca Ruth Candy, who spent two years working out how to get bourbon to hold inside a chocolate.
The tall black barns you see everywhere out here are the reason bourbon is a Kentucky product at all. A rickhouse is not climate controlled. Kentucky swings hot in summer and cold in winter, and the barrels swing with it — the wood expands and the spirit is pushed into the char, then contracts and pulls it back out, over and over for years. That cycling is where the colour and most of the flavour come from. It also loses you liquid: two to four percent of every barrel evaporates each year, the “angel’s share”, so a well-aged barrel gives up a third of itself before anyone tastes it.
Bardstown
We had lunch at Bardstown Bourbon Company. They are a Napa Valley style distillery offering a full service bar, a library of vintage bourbons, and a restaurant in a contemporary style. Their sample of Kentucky hams and cheese board along with a couple of their bourbons on ice were delicious.
Downtown Bardstown is charming and the area is known for bourbon production — it calls itself the Bourbon Capital of the World, and with Heaven Hill, Willett, Barton 1792, Log Still and the rest inside a short drive, nobody argues much. It is also one of the oldest towns in Kentucky, chartered in 1780, and the courthouse square is worth the walk on its own.
Louisville
It is a friendly city that holds frequent festivals to keep life entertaining — while we were there, goat races in the middle of downtown in the winter. Just a reason to get out of the house for polka music, beer and bratwurst. Louisville is a university town and a major medical community, rich in sports, restaurants, arts, playhouses, distilleries and horse racing. It punches enormously above its weight for a city that sits somewhere around thirtieth in the country by population, and further down than that if you count the metro area.
That medical community is the reason I know the place. Louisville has a teaching hospital, a trauma centre, a children’s hospital and a transplant programme packed into a few downtown blocks, which is a lot of medicine for a city this size and is why people come here to train.
An oddity of my own training there: I was chief resident twice. Anesthesiology added an extra year to the residency while I was in the middle of it, and the way the timing fell I ended up serving as chief two years running. How I got the job in the first place is a quirk of the way the specialty examines itself. Residents sit the written boards every year, but only the senior year counts — the earlier sittings are practice. I passed on the first attempt in my first year and every year after, and my scores came back in the top one percent in the country, so the chairman made me chief.
None of that is what I remember, though. What I remember is that people talked to you. Residency is a hard few years anywhere, and the difference between doing it somewhere friendly and doing it somewhere that isn’t is not a small one.
There are an incredible number of things to see and do around the city. A week is just enough to get a taste of the town, but not enough to see most of the main attractions.
Kentucky is a southern state and is culturally southern — southern dialects, cuisine, bluegrass and evangelical populations — yet distinctly different from the Deep South. It never seceded, it sent men to both armies, and it has been arguing with itself about which direction it faces ever since.
Louisville South KOA, Shepherdsville
We had stayed here before, in April 2020, when the pandemic had shut most of the state. Our site had a great view into the trees and was spacious. I first stayed here in 1986 in my VW beetle and slept in a tent at the start of my residency until my first paycheck arrived and I could afford a place to rent. From Land Between the Lakes it was a three-hour drive.
A four leaf clover. That is two in two weeks, after the one we found on St. Patrick’s Day at Mammoth Cave. The usual estimate is one stem in five thousand, so either Kentucky clover is unusually generous or Sandy has a better eye than the statistics allow for.
Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory
The factory is in downtown Louisville. In 1884, seventeen-year-old Bud Hillerich, whose family owned a woodworking shop, was watching local legend Pete Browning play baseball. Pete broke his bat, so Bud offered to make him a new one — and got three hits with it the next game, as the company tells it. Pete’s nickname was “The Louisville Slugger.” The name stuck to the bat and became the registered trademark in 1894. The Hillerich family business got into bat making and the rest is history.
The tour goes through the factory where billets are lathed into bats. It was an enjoyable visit. For most of the company’s history those billets have been northern white ash, cut from timberland the company owns on the New York–Pennsylvania border — ash is light, strong and flexible, and it shows a straight grain a hitter can read. Since the emerald ash borer arrived from Asia and started killing ash across the eastern United States, they have moved heavily into hard maple and yellow birch. Maple is denser and does not flake the way ash does, which is why so many modern players use it, and also why maple bats break in two rather than fraying.
Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville
In the mid 1800s Louisville needed a cemetery. Cave Hill was a farm with rolling hills and was very picturesque — it takes its name from an actual cave on the property. A garden cemetery was a new style that was emerging at the time. The city chartered it in 1848 and brought in a Hartford engineer, Edmund Francis Lee, who looked at the hills and basins and laid the whole thing out as landscape rather than grid.
That movement is worth understanding, because it explains why this place feels the way it does. Before the 1830s, American burial grounds were bleak churchyards in the middle of town. The rural or garden cemetery was the reaction: parkland on the edge of the city, winding drives, water, specimen trees, sculpture. And crucially, they were built to be visited. Cities did not yet have public parks — Central Park was still a decade away when Cave Hill opened — so people came out here to walk, picnic and take the air. Garden cemeteries were America’s first public parks, and the popularity of them is what convinced cities they needed the real thing.
The landscape gardeners embellished the cemetery with exotic trees, shrubs and ponds, and they never stopped. Cave Hill’s 296 acres are now an accredited arboretum with more than 500 species of tree and shrub, including around two dozen Kentucky state champions — the largest known specimen of their kind in the state. Come in late March and the magnolias alone are worth the drive.
Marble workers and sculptors created beautiful artworks that have made this a very unique cemetery.
We only drove through about a third of the cemetery because a number of funerals were in progress during our visit. There are recognisable people buried here, but the number of monuments is overwhelming. Muhammad Ali is here, in a plot he chose himself, and the miles-long funeral procession through Louisville in 2016 is still the largest thing this city has done. Colonel Harland Sanders is here too, under a bust, which closes a loop with the original café in Corbin we had visited two weeks earlier. So is George Rogers Clark, who founded the city. And so are Patty and Mildred Hill, two Louisville sisters — a kindergarten teacher and a composer — who in 1893 wrote a classroom greeting called “Good Morning to All”. Somebody swapped the words, and it became “Happy Birthday to You,” which is very likely the most-sung song in the English language.
The grounds are peaceful and a great place to just reflect on and appreciate life.
Jeffersonville, Indiana
Jeffersonville is a small friendly town across the Ohio River. It’s away from the congestion of Louisville’s traffic, parking and crowds. When you can’t find a restaurant reservation, Jeffersonville is the place to go for service and better prices. The Big Four Bridge, an old railroad span converted to a pedestrian and bike crossing, will walk you over the river from Louisville’s Waterfront Park and drop you a few blocks from dinner.
Just downstream at Clarksville is one of the odder things in this part of the country. The Falls of the Ohio — the rapids that put Louisville here in the first place — expose a fossil bed about 390 million years old, from a time when this was a shallow tropical sea south of the equator. It is described as the largest exposed Devonian fossil bed in the world, it was named a National Natural Landmark in 1966, and when the river is low you can walk out onto it and look at coral in the rock.
Indiana also has a small personal claim on me. I got my PADI certification while I was living in Louisville, and the open water dives were done in a rock quarry on the Indiana side. There was still a thin skin of ice on the surface and maybe a couple of inches of visibility. You went down, you found the rope to a submerged vehicle, you completed the skills, you came back up. My first real dive after that was with Dr. Karen Burman in Cozumel in the 1980s — bath-warm water, a hundred feet of visibility, and the reef falling away underneath me. So alive, what an experience. Sadly, the same month we posted Louisville, my dive instructor, Keith Elkins, died as a commercial diver in the Ohio River. After being a dive instructor he successfully had a very long career as a commercial diver in Louisville, which is rare. If God allows, we will swim together in the warm clear vivid brilliant waters of heaven together Keith. My father also passed during this time we were in Kentucky, but more on that later. My father was an amazing man. It was a bittersweet time. In many ways I never should have left Louisville as all I loved was here.
Bernheim Forest
Bernheim is a great place to get away from the crowds and enjoy hiking trails, large grassy areas, trees and spring flowers.
It also belongs in a bourbon post, because bourbon paid for it. Isaac Wolfe Bernheim was born in Germany in 1848 and arrived in America in 1867 with almost nothing, working first as a travelling peddler. He ended up in Kentucky, went into whiskey with his brother, and built the business behind I.W. Harper. In 1928 he bought 12,000 acres of land that had been logged and strip-mined until there was almost nothing left of it, and the following year he gave it away — endowed permanently, for the people of Kentucky, as somewhere ordinary people could get back among trees. The Olmsted Brothers, sons of the man who designed Central Park, drew up the master plan in the 1930s. It opened to the public in July 1950. It now runs to roughly 16,000 acres with a 600-acre arboretum at its heart, and the forest is a century of recovery on ground that had been stripped bare.
The magnolia, apple and cherry trees were in bloom. Bernheim has about 19 different magnolias. Magnolias are worth a second look while you are standing under one: the family is old enough that it was flowering before bees existed, so the flowers are pollinated by beetles, and they are built like it — thick, tough petals that can survive being chewed on, and no true separation between petal and sepal. That is why botanists call the parts tepals.
Even though nighttime temperatures were in the twenties and the trees were just starting to bud, soon enough the days will be hot and humid with evenings filled with fireflies and maybe a mint julep.
Visitor Information
James B. Beam Distilling Co. 568 Happy Hollow Road, Clermont, KY — about 25 minutes south of Louisville and a stop on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. Tours and tastings, the Kitchen Table restaurant, and the American Outpost gift shop. Book tours ahead in season.
Bardstown Bourbon Company. 1500 Parkway Drive, Bardstown, KY — about 45 minutes from Louisville. Restaurant, full bar and a vintage bourbon library. Reservations recommended for the dining room. Bardstown itself has a walkable historic square and several other distilleries within a few miles.
Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. 800 West Main Street, Louisville. Self-guided museum plus a guided factory tour, and every visitor leaves with a mini bat. The 120-foot steel bat outside is hard to miss. Allow about ninety minutes.
Cave Hill Cemetery. 701 Baxter Avenue, Louisville. Admission: free. Open: daily during daylight hours. You can drive or walk the grounds; maps are available at the gate and the office can point you to specific graves. It is an active cemetery — if you meet a funeral, give it room. 296 acres and an accredited arboretum.
Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. 2075 Clermont Road, Clermont, KY — next door to the Jim Beam distillery, which makes the two an easy pairing. Roughly 16,000 acres with 40-plus miles of trail, the Canopy Tree Walk, Lake Nevin and the Forest Giants sculptures. There is a modest per-vehicle admission, higher at weekends; check current hours seasonally.
Falls of the Ohio State Park. 201 West Riverside Drive, Clarksville, IN, next to Jeffersonville. Interpretive centre with an admission charge; the fossil beds themselves are free to walk. Check the river level before you go — the fossil beds are only exposed at low water, generally late summer and autumn.
Louisville South KOA. Shepherdsville, KY, about 20 minutes south of downtown and very close to both Bernheim and Jim Beam. Full hookups, pull-through sites, wooded. A good base if you do not want to drive an RV into the city.
Tips
Pair Jim Beam with Bernheim on the same day. They are almost neighbours in Clermont, and a morning distillery tour followed by an afternoon in the arboretum is a better day than two distilleries back to back.
Do not try to do the Bourbon Trail in a hurry. Two distilleries a day is plenty, and that is before you factor in who is driving. Several sites are 30 to 60 minutes apart on two-lane roads. Pick a base and radiate.
Ask for water at the tasting. A few drops opens up a high-proof pour far more than ice does — ice mutes aromatics as it chills. Every tasting room will give you a pipette if you ask.
Cross the river for dinner. Jeffersonville is ten minutes away, easier to park in, cheaper, and you can usually get a table. Walk the Big Four Bridge back for the skyline.
Give Cave Hill a real hour. Most people drive in for one famous grave and leave. It is a 296-acre arboretum with sculpture in it, and the trees are the point as much as the monuments.
Late March is magnolia season here, and it is a gamble. The early magnolias open on bare wood and one hard frost browns the lot. We got lucky. If you are coming for blooms, have a backup plan.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many distilleries can you visit in a day near Louisville?
Two is comfortable, three is a lot. Tours run 60 to 90 minutes and the sites are spread across a wide rural area. Plan a designated driver or use one of the bourbon tour shuttles that run out of downtown.
Why is bourbon made in Kentucky?
Corn grows well here, limestone-filtered water is iron-free, and — the part people forget — the climate does the ageing. Hot summers and cold winters push the spirit into the charred oak and pull it back out again year after year, which is where the colour and most of the flavour come from. Bourbon can legally be made anywhere in the United States, but the warehouses work best here.
What is the angel’s share?
The whiskey that evaporates out of the barrel while it ages — roughly two to four percent a year in Kentucky. A barrel left in a rickhouse for a decade gives up a large fraction of its contents before anyone drinks a drop, which is a good part of why older bourbon costs what it does.
Who is buried at Cave Hill Cemetery?
Muhammad Ali, Colonel Harland Sanders, city founder George Rogers Clark, and Patty and Mildred Hill, the sisters who wrote the tune that became “Happy Birthday to You”. There is also a national cemetery within the grounds. Admission is free and the office can direct you.
What wood are Louisville Slugger bats made from?
Traditionally northern white ash, cut from company timberland on the New York–Pennsylvania border. Since the emerald ash borer began killing ash across the eastern United States, hard maple and yellow birch have taken over much of the production. Maple is denser and is now the common choice at professional level.
Is Bernheim Forest worth visiting?
Yes, and especially in spring. It is 16,000 acres of recovered forest with a 600-acre arboretum, 40-plus miles of trail and a serious magnolia collection, and it sits right beside the Jim Beam distillery. It was given to Kentucky in 1929 by Isaac Bernheim, who made his money in bourbon.
Can you see the Falls of the Ohio fossil beds year round?
No. They are only exposed when the river is low, usually from late summer into autumn. The interpretive centre at Falls of the Ohio State Park in Clarksville, Indiana is open year round and will tell you the current river stage before you walk down.
Next stop: Lexington, Kentucky and the Bourbon Trail.
