For other tales of musical adventure, please visit Soccer Mom in Denial.
First of all... wow. What a welcome home! I saved reading all your messages until I was ready to step back into this blog. Thanks for the well wishes. I planned my courses and then we had a great vacation to... yes, you guessed it, Kentucky.
If I didn't say it clearly enough the first time, we had a GREAT time in Kentucky. ;-)
Our only other experience with Kentucky was driving through it on the way to Florida. And mostly, we just wanted to get through it, because the Smokies were coming up and we heard they were just gorgeous. And while we noticed that Kentucky was pretty nice, too, it was still at the beginning of our drive, so we mostly slept through it.
This time around, though, we'd planned on spending a few days around Lexington and a few days in Tennessee, near the northwestern edge of the Smokies.
But we spent the whole time in Lexington and had a blissful time. We found interesting things to do, (which I'll blog about in other posts), but what really blew us away were the amazingly friendly people, the beauty of the countryside, and way too much good food. We were all exhausted, and Kentucky rocked us gently like a babe in his mama's arms.
Kentucky, the H. family is ready to write love letters to you.
Now, it wasn't like everything went according to plan, because if it had, it wouldn't have been an H. family vacation. We just don't roll that way. And on one of the days when nothing went according to plan, we ended up at the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame Museum in Renfro Valley, KY. And this was an interesting stop for us, because really, we are not country music fans (well, I am, a bit, and D and I both love any kind of grassroots music, and we all love the Dixie Chicks forever, but this was still a weird stop for us). And that tiny, little, three-room museum was darned interesting.
We also picked up a dandy CD there: Ricky Skaggs and Friends Sing the Songs of Bill Monroe. The "friends" included such greats as Mary Chapin Carpenter, our beloved Chicks, Charlie Daniels, John Fogerty, Bruce Hornsby, Joan Osborne, and the wonderful Dolly Parton, among others, so how could we resist?
But there's nothing like old Bill himself, perhaps the founding father of Bluegrass. And for that matter, there's nothing like Bluegrass. And, as you can probably guess, I also feel there's no place quite like the Blue Grass region of Kentucky. So in honor of all of that, I give you: Bill Monroe singing "Blue Moon of Kentucky".
Enjoy, y'all.
