And Lastly, a Bit of History

I was excited that we were traveling through Louisville because it meant I could check another president off my presidential bucket list. Zachary Taylor, our 12th president, was buried in Louisville in none other than Zachary Taylor National Cemetery. He wasn't hard to find as it wasn't a very large cemetery.

The house he grew up in was just around the corner and still used as a residential property.

In our travels to find Zachary, we accidentally stumbled upon an historical property called Locust Grove. Delightfully (to me only probably), we discovered that one of my favorite historical figures, George Rogers Clark, resided there for a time and it was also the "unofficial" start of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

We arrived too late on Friday to visit the house, but swung back on Saturday morning after breakfast. It was an exceptionally beautiful day.

We did a short tour of the house, which has been restored to the time when George stayed there. The wooden banister was very impressive and original, so of course Wyatt tried to gnaw on it.

 

The kids were pretty well behaved and our tour guide even mentioned how good they were being. If we had had a bit more time, we could have visited the cemetery where George was buried, but I guess we'll save that for our next trip through Louisville.

 And so we began the final leg of our journey home.

We did stop briefly at another historical site on the way home so we could stretch our legs: The Tippecanoe Battlefield.

I tried to get a nice picture of Wyatt for his preschool cubby, but he just loves to make it difficult for me.

The other two wanted some pictures too.

 

Another successful family vacation in the books 🙌

B. Harrison and a Museum

For Noah's actual birthday weekend, we went on a short road trip to Indianapolis. Our main purpose was to visit the largest children's museum in the country, but since we had a few hours to kill on Saturday we took a tour of President Benjamin Harrison's home and visited his grave site.

The following day (once Wyatt had recovered from his ER visit) we headed to the Children's Museum. It did not disappoint. It was five levels of imagination and fun. The outside of the museum had these huge dinosaurs that appear to be breaking into the building.

There were more dinosaurs on the inside. it was almost a mini-Field Museum. There was a place to dig for fossils, a place to dress up like a dinosaur and sit in a dinosaur nest, and a place to play with little dinosaur action figures.

There was, of course, a large train room with trains to play with, trains to watch, and a large train you could pretend to ride in

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There was a neat water feature called "The Creek"

And a huge climbing tree that Noah loved. He climbed all the way to the top into the little boat.

There was a large exhibit dedicated to China where Noah gave a check-up to a baby panda and served some patrons of a Chinese Bistro

 Another floor had an Egyptian Mummy exhibit with an archaeological dig

There was so much to see that it was almost impossible to do in one visit (and we were short a couple hours due to the ER escapade). We will have to go back in a year or two for another visit.