This post is a long time coming, but I travelled to Lexington so that I could Run the Bluegrass half marathon and check Kentucky off my 50 states running list back in March. Since the half marathon was on a Saturday, I drove in on Friday in order to pick up my race packet and get settled at the hotel. Saturday’s weather was really rainy, so after I took my post-race nap, I headed out to see what I could find downtown. 

I didn’t really plan anything specific to do while I was in Lexington and my afternoon nap meant I didn’t leave the hotel until about 5:00, so there weren’t too many shops open downtown by the time I started wandering around. One recommended place to visit was the Old Kentucky Chocolates at Lexington Center. There weren’t too many shops still open when I got there, but I wandered around a bit and did find some good treats. The building is connected to more shops across the street at the Victorian Square Shops, so I was able to check out that building as well (left picture below), but again, there wasn’t much open, so I just wandered around the building for awhile before heading back to my car. The numerous stairways in the building reminded me of an Escher painting, but due to the lighting, I really couldn’t get a good picture of them, but you could look over the side of a railing and see stairways everywhere and occasionally you really had to look to figure out where they came from and make sure they weren’t just stairs to nowhere!

On my way to my next stop, I ran across the Lincoln mural and it is definitely striking as you drive down the street in an otherwise pretty standard landscape of buildings. Apparently the mural is only about 6 months old and I found a time-lapse video showing the creation of it last November. The mural is on the back of the Kentucky Theatre and apparently there are several other murals in other parts of the city, but I didn’t see any of those.

While I still had a little bit of daylight left, I wanted to check out Thoroughbred Park where they have statues of a “photo finish” as well as some frolicking foals and a tribute to Civil War-era horse, Lexington, who represented the city in the 1854 Great Post Stakes in New Orleans. 

Sunday I did a little bit more wandering around to the colleges in the city. Since the University of Kentucky officially killed my NCAA bracket while I was in town, I thought it was fitting to check out a little bit of their campus. Even though the weather was better Sunday morning, I still had a long drive home, so most of my sightseeing was done via my car. After that, I had to check out Translyvania University since I had seen so many signs for it around town and I found a single room log cabin which was built by Colonel Robert Patterson in the late 1700’s and became part of Translyvania University in 1939. 

Have you ever been to Lexington? What else should I have visited while I was there?