Road Trip to Woodstock & Beyond - Days 4 & 5

 Click HERE to read Day 1     Click HERE to read Day 2&3

After the Corvette Museum, it was a nice little 2-hour drive to Louisville, Kentucky, and the next stop on our itinerary - Momma's Mustard, Pickles & BBQ Restuarant. After our horrible experience with the barbeque at Tom’s in Memphis, we decided to try for some good “Q” at another highly-touted eatery. Fortunately, despite the weird name, this place came much closer to our expectations. It wasn’t great Texas barbeque, but it wasn’t bad. Clean, friendly service, reasonable prices, and cute girls as waitresses. OK, in today’s culture that may be considered sexist by some, but these 2 old guys raised in the old days of yore still appreciate nice female works of art and we will not apologize!

When in Louisville, of course, you must tour the Louisville Slugger Factory & Museum. Looking it up online, it was “strongly suggested” that you get your tickets before you arrive as they are often sold out. Our arrival time left only 2 tours remaining for that day and both were almost full so we checked into a really nice hotel, the Fairfield Inn & Suites Louisville East. This was one of the best hotels we stayed in the whole trip - plenty of parking, friendly staff, and clean facilities. The room was clean and very nice with very comfortable beds. Wi-Fi was fast and never dropped. In the morning there was plenty of hot water for a good shower. Quiet all night long. Can’t ask for much more than that! We bought our Louisville Slugger tickets for the next day, got some sandwiches, and brought them back to the room to eat while we watched more of the Women’s Softball Championship.

Day 5

Entrance to Louisville
Slugger Factory
 & Museum

Arriving at the Museum at the appointed time the next morning, we were amazed to find that instead of the group of 20 for the tour, we were the only 2 people! We had a great tour guide who was able to give us his undivided attention. It was a really interesting experience. We learned how the bats are made, the different kinds of wood preferred by different major-league players, and watching them actually being made was way cool. Everyone, including the workers, were very friendly. Our guide was knowledgeable and never seemed to get tired of our many questions. As a souvenir, we both got a “nub,” (the end part of a bat that is cut off before the final processing) from a bat destined to be used by a major league player. At the end of the tour, we were given another souvenir, a small Louisville Slugger bat. It was a very enjoyable experience and especially interesting to me as a former user of Louisville Slugger bats when I played youth and high school baseball. I thought the souvenirs in the gift shop were a bit expensive and I didn’t find a shirt I liked so I didn’t get anything besides the souvenirs from the tour and a refrigerator magnet for my collection. I highly recommend this stop.

Other than stopping for a fast-food lunch, gas, and road food, the rest of the day was spent driving, telling stories, remembering things we have experienced together, and generally, just enjoying each other’s company. 360 miles later, we checked into another nice hotel in Washington, Pennsylvania – The Hampton Inn & Suites, Pittsburg-Meadow Lands. After driving most of the day, we dropped off for a nice, restful sleep by 10:30. We had another interesting little side trip scheduled for the next morning.

Another nice breakfast at a nearby Waffle House and 35 miles on down the road brought us to the small, quiet little town of Perryopolis, Pennsylvania. Why in the world would we drive so far to visit such a small, rather unremarkable town? To see the “Buffalo Bill House” of course. No, not the Buffalo Bill of Old West fame. We’re talking Buffalo Bill from the movie “Silence of the Lambs.” He of the famous chilling line, “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” If you watched this movie for the first time late at night like I did, there wasn’t much sleep afterward as your eyes stayed wide open and you jumped at every little sound in the night. Here in little Perryopolis is the house used for the exterior shots as the house where Buffalo Bill had his victim pit and his little dog and his bottle of lotion. Except for the movie sign in the front yard and the "Private Property" signs, it looks like just a normal nice house in a small, quiet town. A fun thing to tell your friends about what you saw on your road trip! Maybe the best thing though is the relaxing drive getting to the house. You must drive down a well-maintained, pretty, 2-lane road with trees on either side closing in over the top, then down a side street through a tunnel dug through a mountain which is followed by a one-lane trestle bridge, and then across a set of railroad tracks. Worth the side trip if you have the time.

"Buffalo Bill's" house

Just 90 miles away was our next stop – Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. I mean, who hasn’t had the desire to see Punxsutawney Phil and visit the famous Gobbler’s Knob where every February 2nd, the venerable, and supposedly immortal, groundhog holds forth each year with his weather predictions. The "Inner Circle" members – recognizable from their top hats and tuxedos – communicate with Phil to receive his prognostication. This suspension of disbelief, a central requirement for the festival, extends to the assertion that the same groundhog has been making predictions since the nineteenth century. According to legend, there is only one Phil, all other groundhogs are impostors. It is claimed that this one groundhog has lived to make weather predictions since 1886, sustained by drinks of "groundhog punch" and "elixir of life" administered at the annual Groundhog Picnic in the fall.

Unknown to most, Phil does not live at Gobbler’s Knob. His actual home is in a nice, cozy den in the Punxsutawney Library. We had that information along with the address of the library, but we drove around for 20 confusing minutes or so because we couldn’t find a building that looked like a library or had a sign indicating it was a library. The address where it was supposed to be was a police station with a parking lot full of police cars. I really needed to relieve myself of the morning’s coffee so I told Chip (who was driving) to just pull into the police station thinking surely they had a bathroom I could quickly borrow. He didn't want to do that because "we'll get a ticket." Then I noticed a line of regular civilian parked cars along one small row so I told Chip just park in there with those cars. Reluctantly, Chip pulled in and parked. Great friend he is, “OK, but if we get a ticket, you’re paying it.” 

Punxsutawney Phil relaxing at home

It was then I finally saw a little sign that just said, “Library.” Maybe one end of the building was a police station and the other end was the library? Walking around to the other side of the building, the side with no parking lot, the side facing a quiet, little park with lots of grass and trees, the side that had no indication you could see from the road that it was a library, and there we found the library’s front door and just inside the front door was, thank goodness, a men’s restroom! A few minutes later, I walked into the aisles of books and a lady told me the library was closed due to Covid restrictions. I asked if this is where Phil lives. Yep, over in the corner and yes, you can go over and see him. Sure enough, looking into an enclosure with a wall of thick glass was the legendary Phil! Unfortunately, the glass was very dirty and scratched up so bad, you could barely see into Phil’s home. I noticed there was another window on the other side that faced outward. We walked outside to the window, but that window too was heavily scratched and dirty. I took several terrible pictures of Phil (due to the condition of the glass), who seemed quite relaxed and paid us no never-mind. I must admit, it was a tad underwhelming. In fact, it was very underwhelming.

Gobbler's Knob Park

Making it back to the car (no ticket!), we then drove about 2 miles outside of town to Gobbler’s Knob. Until I researched it, I thought Gobbler’s Knob was somewhere in Punxsutawney, like in a downtown park. Not so. It is about 2 miles southeast of town, set off all by itself. We arrived to find we were the only people there, so we took our time driving around looking at the well-maintained stage and park. It too was a bit underwhelming, but still, we enjoyed seeing in person the stage and all the Groundhog Day things we’ve seen on TV for years. 

The famous stage where Phil
delivers his prediction

We made our way back to town to eat at Joe’s Drive-In, the highly-rated old-fashioned diner famous for serving up the best hamburgers in Punxsutawney. The burgers were ok. Certainly not Whataburger or even In-N-Out quality, but I guess the Punxsutawney residents are pleased as punch with them.

Putting Punxsutawney in our rearview mirror, we headed about 80 miles south to Stoystown, Pennsylvania and the Flight 93 National Memorial. Neither of us anticipated the intense feelings we would soon feel.

Phil statue at Joe's Drive-In