I played with sketchy wi-fi at the hotel for an hour trying to get yesterday’s blog to post. Finally had to do it on John’s laptop. I think mine is getting too old to hold the links or something, because I spend a lot of time reconnecting wi-fi in our hotels. Either that or the hotels just don’t have a good enough system to cope with all the devices that are online in all the rooms (which I suspect may be the problem because the wi-fi in our Paris hotel tonight is working fine.) Either way it is very frustrating. And time consuming. I did get done and we were on the road by 10.

We only had one stop planned because it was over 5 hours drive to Paris. Paris is 8 minutes drive from Claiborne Farm where we will go see the Thoroughbred racing stable tomorrow.

Our stop was still in Indiana; at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial. Lincoln spent his formative years here – from 7 to 21 – in three different cabins, none of which survive today. His mother is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery that is within the Park.

The stone panels portray important periods of Lincoln’s life. The Visitor’s Center is through the door on the right and extends around the back of the curve.

There was a nice large exhibit inside the Visitor’s Center so we wandered past the displays before heading to the cabin memorial. There is also a replica of a frontier farm with costumed staff going about the various chores. We did not take the time to go there as we had a long drive today. We did not even take time to find a geocache or two.

There were two large halls at either end of the Visitor’s Center. The west one was named for Lincoln’s mother and was used as a meeting room.

This is an image taken at the Frontier Farm to show what Nancy Lincoln’s home was like.

There were many small cards with details or points of interest about Lincoln’s life. I only photographed a few and I have posted fewer still.

The east wing hall was a church sanctuary named after Abraham Lincoln.

We walked the gravel path through the woods past split rail fences to the Cabin Memorial that is on the edge of the replica Frontier Farm.

This is a bronze sculpture.

We left the memorial at 10 minutes to 12 and headed southeastward to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, from which we would go east to Paris, which is a bit northeast of Lexington. We drove through a lot of farmland on some nice quiet roads.

We drove through Santa Claus while still in Indiana. They had a Kringle’s store, Christmas Lake, Jingle Way Road, and a huge – and very popular – theme park called Holiday World. There were large parking lots on both sides of the road that were full of cars.

We again drove through one of these nice blue bridges across the Ohio River to re-enter Kentucky.

The big barge tugs move goods on the Ohio, just like they do the Mississippi.

We actually encountered rocks that had to be cut through for the road. We have been on flat land or rolling hills so long it almost felt like home to see some rock cliffs beside the road.

Hartford, KY is the state capital and there was viewpoint overlooking a part of the town that had a really nice view (this is zoomed in. It was quite aways distant). They are refinishing and/or replacing the rock on the top. It is expected to take the rest of the year to finish. I asked a fellow where they got all the scaffolding and he said they brought it in from all over. How would you like to climb those stairs to work every day?

This is the Kentucky Military History Museum. It is in the former Arsenal building.

Estate-type properties like this with masses of lawn to mow have been very frequent sights the last few days. As we drove between Hartford and Paris this was almost the norm.

We are in Kentucky horse country! Yay! This is also Kentucky Bourbon country and we drove by quite a few large distilleries including Jim Bean.

Many of the sprawling farm properties had this type of double fencing around really large acreages. I will ask about it at Clairborne tomorrow.

We arrived in Paris at 6:30, which was 7:30 local time due to having entered a new time zone. We are back to being three hours ahead of home again.