There are a couple of different types of vacations. The ones that get all of the attention are the huge ones. Elizabeth and I have been on The Big One a lot recently – our national parks/engagement trip in 2021, Glacier in 2022, our honeymoon in 2023, our Europe trip in 2025. But one of the things that my work schedule (currently starting a new string of mids every 7 weeks) is super conducive toward is the Thursday to Sunday weekend getaway. Work the 7 straight mids, get off at 6:00 am on Thursday, fly somewhere after Elizabeth gets off of work, and then come back Sunday evening. It’s maximum life enjoyment at a minimum of commitment for us.
Because of the ephemeral nature of these weekend getaways, they sometimes get less love in the planning stages than The Big One. That was certainly the case for our trip to Kentucky in November of 2025. Coming less than a month after we returned from Europe, it was tough to find the time to make plans.
How did we even end up in a place like Kentucky in the middle of November? The reason was provided by Elizabeth’s job, which sent her to the annual meeting of the International Agency of Emergency Managers (IAEM) to give a presentation. With her marvelous capacity to figure out the angles, Elizabeth long ago discovered that her job will pay for her flight to arrive somewhere a few days early as long as it doesn’t cost more than the same flight when she needs to arrive. She wanted to use it in this case to spend the weekend with me since she would be giving her big presentation on my actual 28th birthday. With no real pre-birthday plans myself, I shrugged and figured “why not?” We worked out a plan of action: fly to Louisville on the morning of Friday, November 14, spend the night in Louisville, then spend the night of November 15th at Mammoth Cave National Park and get most of 2 days in the park. It was up to me to fill in the details of how to spend the time.
When November 13th rolled around, Scipio was duly bundled off to Fetch and Stay for a couple of days and the two of us packed our bags. I thought how funny it was that in recent years travel like this had become so nonchalant for us. We do it so often that there are a million little routines. We know which suitcases the other will prefer to use, which row to park in depending on the time of day at Will Rogers’ outdoor parking lot, and the exact right time to order Starbucks from the other side of airport security. Meister family travel in 2025 is a well-oiled machine.
Our flights from OKC to Midway and then Louisville were fairly uneventful. The final approach into Louisville was a little bit wild, and not just because of the deadly UPS plane crash that had occurred a week prior. It turns out that your flight path on a southbound approach into Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport takes you right over the University of Louisville stadium (a little foreshadowing, since the Cardinals were playing that night and I’d bought us tickets) and Churchill Downs (also foreshadowing).
For the largest shipping-hub airport in the U.S, Louisville is surprisingly modest in terms of passenger amenities. It’s small enough, in fact, that the rental car counters are in the same foyer as the baggage claim. By the time Elizabeth had gotten her checked bag, I’d already picked up the keys to our car (for once, it was in my name). All in all, it was a remarkably efficient process. Louisville is in the Eastern time zone, so we’d moved ahead an hour, and yet Elizabeth and I were still seated at Craft House Pizza near the airport by 12:30, sipping on my (8.5/10) cream ale.
The pizza was also a solid (maybe not 8.5/10, but at least 7.5/10) option. And the salad was absolutely drowned in ranch dressing, which starts bringing us dangerously close to Elite Restaurant territory.
After lunch we headed down to the TownePlace Suites by Marriott Louisville, a hotel whose name made it sound much fancier than it was. Not that it was bad – it was a clean, well-furnished three-star hotel. It would be more than good enough for the two of us to sleep in for the night. It was, in fact, pretty tempting to lay down in bed and go to sleep right now for a quick nap. Our flight hadn’t been the earliest I’d ever been on, but those 4:00 alarms are never easy on me, much less Elizabeth. We narrowly avoided the temptation though. Good thing, because it was a fun afternoon and we really managed to catch up on sleep over the rest of the weekend.
Our main event for the night of November 14 was the Louisville/Clemson game at 7:30. It was about 2:00 now, so there was still most of an afternoon for us to kill. My research had showed me that Churchill Downs is located just down the road from L&N Family Credit Union Stadium. The Kentucky Derby Museum is located right on-site and is only $22 to visit, which includes a tour. Elizabeth’s family has always been really into the Derby so I thought she’d enjoy it.
There were a lot of Clemson fans in the parking lot at the racetrack, but it wasn’t too bad otherwise. Even from outside the track, we could hear the announcer calling horses into the blocks, so apparently it was an active race day. We talked about just paying the $10 to go into the track instead of touring the museum, but I kind of thought that just going to watch horse racing without betting on it might be boring. Museums are usually pretty fun, or they’re at least interesting.
While paying our entry fee into the museum, a front desk worker let us know that while the museum and the racetrack were separate, the tour actually enters the stadium and sometimes you can see a race. That sounded like a pretty great compromise to me. That way we weren’t locked into three hours of racetrack time but could still experience something new and unique. In the meantime, there was a full, interactive museum plus a film to check out.
I’d give the museum a rating of 8/10 after visiting (I really need to stop with the rating on a scale of 1/10. I’d rate that shtick 0/10). The exhibits were neat, starting with a walk-through history of the Kentucky Derby dating back to the 1800s. A bunch of the info was stuff I’d never even imagined. Stuff like the history of black jockeys dating back to slavery days, and the long road they faced to be allowed back into the big races. It was neat and though-provoking.
To my amusement, there was also a section where museum-goers were educated in the fine art of horse betting. There was a whole simulated race where you could pick your horses on-screen to win, place, and show beforehand. Elizabeth made her selections and I was amused to find her cheering on her horse at the same time as a bunch of tween girls. The Kentucky Derby Museum – fueling America’s gambling addiction since 1985. There was an area right next to it where you could be a jockey in a simulated race. The teenage boys going crazy in their race were pretty funny to watch, as well.
There was even an entire upstairs section for Secretariat alone. I wouldn’t have minded having more time to poke around the memorabilia and exhibits, but it was almost time for the movie showing. The showing was in an open 360-degree theater – meaning there were like 20 or 25 people sitting on swivel chairs on the ground, and the movie played various clips all around that constantly made you turn in your chair. It was a fun concept and at times really well-executed, like watching horses dash around a corner in the screens, but it also was a bit of an overwhelming experience.
The experience after it was not overwhelming, it was just fun. A tour guide met all of the movie-watchers in the theatre and promised to take everyone inside the stadium to watch a race. I didn’t really think I’d be spending my Friday afternoon watching a horse race at the site of the Kentucky Derby, but that’s where the day was headed!
Churchill Downs is massive. It’s pretty incredible to think about having a big dirt track that’s a full mile in length (four times the size of an Olympic-sized track) and has a huge set of stands along the entire final straightaway.
The thing you immediately realize is that if you’re there to see the Derby, you won’t actually get to see any of the race from your seat except for a tiny portion. And then if you’re one of the tens of thousands of people who attend and remain on the infield, you’re basically seeing nothing. Fortunately, the Downs has thought of that, and put in a 10-story-tall video board on the back straightaway that lets you see everything happening in high definition. According to our guide, locals don’t bother to come to the track. They just get up on the roofs of houses that can see the screen and watch the races from there.
The tour guide continued her spiel as Churchill Downs’ beloved bugle player called the horses into the starting blocks 1/4 mile away. Then the horses were off. At least, the megascreen showed that they were off; there was no way to tell otherwise. It was a bit of anticlimax as they stretched out along the back stretch.
But then they were coming around the final turn and approaching us. And to be honest, I was blown away. Sure, you can read that a racehorse can clock in at 40 mph. But it’s another to watch those beasts go snorting and thundering by at a speed that would get you a ticket for driving too fast in a residential zone. I was taken aback by it.
One of the horses gave a spirited charge at the finish to run down the leader. Elizabeth yelled “I think he got him!” Someone else disagreed. I said “The brown horse won!” which I thought was an underrated line, but somehow it was unappreciated. We never did find out which horse won, because the tour guide immediately snapped up the little group and took them back toward the museum. The Kentucky Derby Museum is running a really efficient process.
We’d gotten our fill of horses, and now it was time to start thinking in terms of birds. Specifically, Louisville Cardinals. The stadium is a little bit down the road to the east of Churchill Downs, so we decided to move the car (even though that meant paying for parking) so that we could be closer to the interstate afterward. There was a $20 lot basically right across the street from the stadium. Perfect, right? (Wrong.) It was still only 4:30 and a full 3 hours before kickoff. Even knowing my desire to get into stadiums early and the fact that the two of us needed dinner, there was all of the time in the world. There was plenty of time, in fact, to take a walk around the stadium toward the Louisville campus to the north.
I’m a big fan of walking around college campuses. I don’t know, it reminds me of being young and walking on-campus at the University of Michigan and feeling like anything would be possible once I reached the age of the people who walked on those sidewalks. Elizabeth and I have been to a few universities in our day visiting college football stadiums and I have positive memories of just about all of them – walking Scipio at Vanderbilt during covid, visiting the University of Wyoming the night before we got engaged, wandering around the Kansas stadium before Baker Mayfield slaughtered them. I would not consider Louisville’s to be up to the same snuff as some of the most beautiful, but the University of Texas is up to that snuff and the Longhorns are the antagonists of history, so what does that prove?
Louisville, for a commuter school, isn’t all that bad at all. It was weird having highways going past the administration buildings, but I guess that’s what you get for being in a city. It was a perfect evening to be walking around, too – just cool enough to be delightful.
But if there is a lasting impression from our trip to Louisville, it is that they might have the best Mexican restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. It’s almost embarrassing to say because there’s no way a landlocked city bordering the midwest should have insanely good Mexican, for heaven’s sake. But El Molcajete was just that good, dammit. The restaurant was only 3 blocks west of the stadium, so I figured we’d be waiting up to an hour just to sit down. But no, this little hole-in-the-wall joint wasn’t even completely full. Elizabeth and I walked in through the darkening twilight, got seated right at the counter, and were immediately brought menus and drinks. Elizabeth was disappointed to find that they didn’t have margaritas on the menu. On the contrary, the moment I saw that there were vats churning out agua fresca with handwritten labels, I knew we’d found a gem.
And a gem it was.
With all of those delicious carnitas settled into my tummy, I was ready to cap off a really fun day with some no-stakes-for-me college football. I love watching Oklahoma or Michigan play. There’s nothing like the heart-wrenching moment right before kickoff when you realize it’s all about to go down. But I have to admit, going to a game between two universities that I have no ties to whatsoever was a relaxing and extremely fun way to watch football.
It was a short walk to L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium from El Molcajete. The entrance into the stadium was pretty neat, too – it was like a red carpet full of tents and stuff that you can see on the right in the above image. I would advocate for more athletic venues to adopt this model. The inside of the stadium was a little less exciting, though it did look like there were good food options. But in our effort to get to our seats, Elizabeth and I didn’t explore the ground level.
That’s because I had purchased nosebleeds (and expensive-ish nosebleeds, at that) on the upper deck. They required a series of circular ramps to get all the way to the top, kind of similar to OU’s setup (though these felt steeper – perhaps my knee was just protesting). At least the top had two points in its favor. First of all, it commanded a pretty great view of the Louisville suburbs, and you could even see all the way downtown.
More to my liking, somebody in their corporate wisdom had named this the “UPS Flight Deck”.
One week after a UPS plane crashed at Louisville, the timing could not have felt more awkward to be up on the UPS Flight Deck. I’m sure that crash was in Elizabeth’s mind all night as gigantic planes came approaching from the north, looking like they were on a beeline to plow right into the stands where we sat. I was a little surprised that the stadium noise was loud enough to drown out the “giant aircraft flying just above and behind you” roar, but it was.
We reached our seats around 7:00 pm, a good half an hour before the game kicked off. The stadium was still largely empty, though Louisville fans did make a decent dent in the empty-seat ratio by about kickoff.
It was a blackout crowd on a Friday night, so I will admit that the crowd leaned more toward a disappointment than anything else. It feels like it should have been raucous. But this far up into the UPS Flight Deck, it’s also possible that we were just enough removed from the action. For certain, the Louisville fans directly in front of us were as into the game as anyone could want (standing the whole time even though nobody else in the section was).
Louisville had started the 2025 season at 7-1 with an upset win over Miami to vault into the ACC Championship conversation. Just as I was starting to get excited about it (maybe it was time to be a Cardinals fan?), they went and got upset by Cal at home the week before we arrived. Still, they were 7-2 and had a path to greatness. Clemson entered at a mere 4-5 but had just strangled Florida State the week before, so there was that. Oddsmakers saw an evenly matched game. And that’s about what unfolded below us while we sipped our $15 beers (or bourbon sours in Elizabeth’s case). What oddsmakers and myself didn’t know was just how hilariously sloppy the path would be to get there.
Clemson drove the length of the field on the first drive using screen pass after screen pass but had to settle for a field goal to make it 3-0. Louisville countered with a long field goal of their own at the end of the first quarter to tie it at 3, then struck on a long pass in the middle of the second quarter that triggered a controversial out of bounds/touchdown/fumble ruling near the front right pylon. After a lengthy review that featured a spirited debate between myself, a few Louisville fans to our right, and the group of Clemson grads sitting behind us, the refs decided to give the Cardinals the ball on the 1. They punched it in and then missed the extra point to make it 9-3. The game remained that way until Louisville fumbled in their own territory at the end of the first half. The Tigers ran for a 25-yard TD a play later and the game entered halftime, 10-9.
It had turned a little bit cool in the evening after a perfect November day. It was nice enough that I wasn’t really cold in shorts, but the sweatshirt that I’d packed as a precaution was nice to have. Most of the people around us were polite; the Clemson fans behind us (who had driven up from South Carolina, and were roughly the same age as us) were extremely pleasant to talk to. Really, everyone except for those two standing bums in front of us who kept blowing their vape trails right into my face.
On the other hand, it was undeniably true that it was getting late and that we’d been up extremely early. Elizabeth couldn’t believe how slowly the second half went. That says something, because she knows how an ESPN standalone broadcast works.
Action resumed with Louisville driving the length of the field to take a 16-10 lead. At one point, the Cardinals motioned from a shotgun formation to a pistol wing look, and I muttered to myself that they’d been running stretch to the C gap out of it a lot. Lo and behold, the subsequent run broke well into the secondary. One of the standing, vaping bums in front of us turned to me and said “I like being near you. You tell me what’s about to happen”. The feeling was not mutual, for what it’s worth. However, the Clemson fans also enjoyed my Garrett Riley commentary, so that was nice.
The teams traded field goals to make it 19-13. Then Clemson embarked on a long drive that got them deep into Louisville territory early in the 4th quarter. Just when it looked like the lead was going to flip, Dabo Swinney brought in a defensive tackle to carry the ball on 3rd and 4th and goal with disastrous results. He fumbled and the game remained 19-13. The Vaping Bums began trash talking the Clemson fans behind us, which made me wonder for the first time if I was rooting for the wrong team.
The Tigers got the ball back quickly and worked a short field touchdown, this time giving the ball to their actual running back on 4th and goal. It was now 20-19 and that missed extra point loomed large. 7 minutes remained.
Jeff Brohm had a few tricks left up his sleeve and ran a slick reverse flea flicker screen pass to gain big yardage into field goal range on the first play of the next drive. But then he got conservative, and the Cards were forced to settle for a 50-yard field goal to try to retake the lead. Oftentimes when you’re in person, it can be extremely difficult to tell if a field goal is good or not; you usually have to wait for fans directly behind the goalposts to either go crazy or not. Well in this case, I didn’t need to wait; the kick was so far left it was visible a couple hundred yards away.
With 4 minutes left, it felt like the game might be over, but this sloppy game had one more sloppy twist in it. Clemson went three and out and needed to punt from their own territory. However, the snap was bad and forced the punter to bend down to get it – and he bent down onto one knee, marking himself down there. Suddenly, Louisville had the ball at the Clemson 23 yard line with 2:30 left. They’d been handed the game on a silver platter.
And they proceeded to return the game on a platter made of pure gold. First, a false start. Then, a rush for a loss of two yards. Then, and unsportsmanlike conduct after a short run (one of several that were called against Brohm’s team in the 4th quarter), to set up 3rd and 29 all the way back from the 42. A 14-yard pass set up Louisville with one last desperation field goal from 45 yards away. This one was off by almost as much as the first one had been, and the game was all but over.
Fans started to stream toward the exits, including the formerly trash-talking Vape Bums. They studiously avoided eye contact with the Clemson fans behind us, who handled the situation with much more aplomb than I ever could have. We decided to join everyone in the crush moving for the exit to try to beat traffic out. Pedestrian traffic in the street was heavy and grumpy, so I was glad we’d parked on the southeast side of the stadium. We got into the car and headed toward the front of the massive $20 parking lot.
And after about 5 or 10 minutes of remaining idle, with standstill traffic in the street ahead of us, is when I realized the absolutely gargantuan mistake that parking here had been. It took the better part of an hour for things to begin to unsnarl. Even though we had been near the front of the lot! The commenters on Reddit were not lying when they said the parking situation near the stadium was dire. The whole thing was a bit of a pain to deal with given how tired the two of us were, but I would not change a thing about the entire day except to park somewhere further from the stadium.
When we did finally make it back to the hotel, sleep came almost immediately. The thing about those short weekend getaways that I mentioned at the top of the article is that you have to work to make them efficient. Long hours, long days of fun. I personally wouldn’t have it any other way. We had two more of those long days to make the most of our weekend. Next up: we were moving down toward Mammoth Cave National Park.
