John and Linda's Travel Journal: Horses, Distilleries and More in Kentucky! (Part 1)

We originally planned to spend one week in Georgetown, just a few miles outside Lexington, KY--Horse Capital of the World--but there was so much to see and do that we extended our stay an extra week.

We're staying at Whispering Hills RV Park just outside Georgetown, a quaint town in the middle of the golden triangle of Cincinnati, Louisville and Lexington. The surrounding area has many horse farms (and cows), rolling hills, and lovely homes (large and small).

So much black or white fencing around the farms

Many of the stables are larger than the homes

First up on the agenda was Kentucky Horse Park. The park is a working horse farm and educational theme park and is dedicated to "man's relationship with the horse." The park has been home to some of the world's greatest competition horses. Since we visited in the off season there were just a few horses at the farm but we enjoyed the few horses we saw.

This little guy was full of energy

It was in the upper 30s when we visited--brrrr!

Additionally, the park contains the International Museum of the Horse, a Smithsonian Affiliate, which has a permanent collection of horse history and memorabilia. The museum was very interesting and even though we are not horse people, we could have easily spent an entire day there.

An exhibit in the museum is Calumet: Five Decades of Champions. It contains over 500 trophies won by horses representing the greatest thoroughbred farm of the 20th century. Whirlaway and Citation Triple Crown trophies are on display. I remember driving by the Calumet farm. I could not even guess the size of it--many hundreds of acres large!

There were also handmade fabric panels depicting horses in sport.

We came across a display that had a saddle on a stand in front of a green screen. A nearby TV superimposed your picture onto a picture of a horse. We took pictures of each other on horses and then we realized we were in the children's section of the exhibit. These 2 big kids really enjoyed themselves!

Whee!

I told John he was too tall so he ducked down

We also visited the Toyota factory in Georgetown, America's first and the world's largest Toyota manufacturing facility. We took a ride around the plant on a guided, tram-driven tour. The factory is HUGE. It covers 7.5 million square feet of floor space, the equivalent of 156 football fields. They employ about 7,000 people plus 2,000 contractors. The tour drove us all around the factory. We saw robots moving chassis components. We saw the automated assembly line moving cars from one station to the next, and the workers doing their jobs before the car moved on. Everybody takes their breaks and lunch hour at the same time so everybody is working on the assembly line at the same time. Workers on a team get to rotate to different jobs within the team so they do not get tired and careless in the same job. They have their own medical clinic and pharmacy on site. Toyota even has gardens where they grow food that they donate to local food banks. Unfortunately photos were only allowed in the Visitor Center and not on the tour.