Tour of Frankfort

Yesterday I spent the entire work day at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Frankfort, Kentucky, at a committee meeting of the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education. The meeting ran from 8:30 AM until a little after 4:00, and after it was over those of us from out of town agreed to get together a little later for dinner.

We all decided to eat at the Longhorn Steak House, which is on the outskirts of town, right off of the interstate (Isn't that where ALL Longhorn Steak Houses are?). The Capital Plaza Hotel is in the downtown area. Since I grew up in Frankfort and knew my way around, I agreed to be one of the drivers to the restaurant, so at 6:15 I loaded up the van with myself and five others and we headed toward the restaurant.

On the way to restaurant I announced to the group that this was my hometown (Some of them already knew that, but I think most of them did not), and I told them that since I was so intimately familar with the town that I'd give them a personal tour along the way. And I did. At the restaurant one of the riders complained about my tour, though, stating that I hadn't taken them to the Capitol, the Viet Nam Memorial, the Old Capitol, or any of the other toursit areas. But I told that person that my tour had never been about the city--it had been about MY EXPERIENCE of the city. Here are some of the sites that I pointed out:

• A tall cliff that several of my high school friends and I repelled down in 1984
• The entrance to my parent's neighborhood, which is where I lived for the first 22 years of my life
• The location of the hole in the fence that my friends and I used to climb through in order to sneak across the Juniper Hill Park golf course in order to get to the swimming pool
• The Burger King restaurant that was THE place to hang out in West Frankfort during my senior year of high school
• Some Mexican restaurant that used to be the best Chinese restaurant in Frankfort, the Jubilee Dragon (That's a shout out to my friend Kevin Kwong!).
• Some Mexican restaurant that used to be a McDonald's and that now IS the coolest Mexican restaurant in Frankfort (That's a shout out to my sister's boyfriend, Jose!).
• An empty building that years ago was the original Wal-Mart, and which was where I worked my way through college
• An Office Depot store that used to be a Kroger, which was where one of the many girls I used to have a crush on worked, and I used to convince my parents to send me there for groceries so that I'd have an excuse to go see her
• The street that led to my middle school and high school
• The Wendy's restaurant where my entire middle school football team jumped up and down on the drive thru scale in order to set the thing off so that we could order drive thru without being in a car.

Now tell me, why would you want to see some old capitol building or war memorial when you could see all that?