Evansville Roadtrip
Evansville
After seeing a news story about the world’s last sailing LST (Landing Ship Tank) traveling down river to Alton, Illinois last year, I got curious and found that it docks in Evansville, Indiana the rest of the year and is open for tours. That’s literally all it takes to start planning to travel somewhere, just that one anchor (no pun intended) experience. Once we had the place, I started looking for things to do. AI has been all the rage at work, so I decided to give it a chance to plan our trip, and it was an educational experience. First and foremost, AI is a great tool for getting a lot of information organized in a consumable format, however, do not just roll with what it churns out and expect things to work out. Our AI-generated itinerary had us going to a wine walk…. three weeks after it happened. It also had us visiting a tap room that had closed two years earlier. The last fun error was that it had us visiting a venue with a complicated schedule and it just assumed it would be open that day, luckily it was, although I don’t think it was supposed to be. Armed with out itinerary, we set the date, booked the hotel, and even enlisted our travel buddies, Todd and Vivian, to go along with. Evansville is only about a two-and-a-half-hour drive, so we got going at about 1 pm on Friday afternoon.
Downtown evansville
There’s a moment in every trip when you wonder if you made a bad decision, and that moment arrived as soon as we rolled into town. The area just north of downtown Evansville is a little rundown with plenty of decrepit buildings and an unusual amount of people traveling around on mobility scooters. Once we got into the triangle formed by the Llyod Expressway, Veterans Memorial Parkway, and highway 41, the look changed drastically. Evansville has a number of older, well-kept buildings like the Old Vanderburgh County Courthouse and the Evansville Post Office. There are also plenty of new ones like the Ford Center, which is what we stayed next to in what looked like the entertainment part of town (the Victory Theatre was one block away). While checking in, we noticed the exact opposite of what we saw on the drive in. There were several well-built and heavily tanned individuals, like way too many. We listened in and realized there was a body-builder competition in town.
The first stop on our Friday afternoon walking tour was the Self.e Alley, which worked well for our first pictures of the trip.
Our next stop was the waterfront by way of Main Street. One oddity was a Chandelier Tree, not sure why it had chandeliers attached to it but, picture taken. Once we got down to the waterfront, we started walking south to check out the plaques and a weird phenomenon seemed to follow most of the inscriptions. Rarely was a plaque referencing a resident, or major event that happened in Ellisville, most of them were referencing famous people that passed through on their way to or from something important. If the event itself wasn’t important, just the mere presence of an important person passing through was enough. The proximity to Charles Dickens, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Samuel Clemens among others was immortalized on the flood wall of the Ohio River.
For dinner, AI had recommended a bar with dive-like qualities called Peephole Bar & Grill and that recommendation was spot on. A few beers and some fried food later and we were taking the long trek next door to Patsy Hartigan’s Irish Pub, or rather, its basement. Underneath the pub is the Clover Club, a gin bar that has all the hallmarks of a speakeasy, but they aren’t trying to keep anything about it secret. If gin isn’t your thing, then there’s an assortment of other alcohols and a beer or two by the bottle. We talked to the staff quite a bit, because at that point, we’d probably had a little more than we should have, but they were great and hopefully we were a little entertaining.
Back at the hotel we watched the end of the Cardinals game on a phone screen and made friends at the bar. Vivian had a $30 nightly tab at the bar to spend with her status so we couldn’t let that go to waste. There was also the offer of shots from some of our new friends but MOST of us passed on that.
Saturday beer day
Our beer day begun with a new rule about not accepting shots from strangers for the rest of the trip. Breakfast was had at the Donut Bank, which had some nice options and the look of a corner bakery operating at the speed of a chain donut shop.
Our second stop of the day is where AI could have really put a damper on the day. It had recommended Bosse Field, home of the Independent League Evansville Otters, and the primary filming site for the movie A League of Their Own. AI said it was open, Apple maps said it was closed, and some reviews said that on non-gameday Saturdays it might be open for whatever reason. Apparently that was enough for AI to send us there, luckily for us there was a boys baseball tournament starting in the afternoon and the gates had been opened ahead of time.
The stadium is the second oldest ballpark in the country, having been built in 1915 and reconstructed in 1930. The ballpark still has the look and feel of the movie, as well as any of the old baseball movies with the single level seating, fold out wooden chairs, and wide-open outfield free of bleachers but littered with local advertising. We walked the field, got some pictures, recreated a scene or two, and headed out towards our first brewery.
Our next stop was Barker Brewhouse for some beer, popcorn, and petting dogs. We went with another flight and then broke out the card came “What Do You Meme” The weather outside looked like it could start pouring down rain at any time, so we hung out for a couple of hours, thanks to the free popcorn.
The first brew stop was Damsel Brew Pub, with its female themed beer names and ominous advertising of Malort. If you haven’t had Malort yet, don’t, just don’t. The beers were good, we got a couple of flights and enjoyed the early afternoon on their patio overlooking Franklin Park and the start of a four-block section of town with restaurants and bars.
Next we drove back to the hotel to drop the vehicle off before heading out on foot to Haynie’s Corner. This came across as a bit of a hipster part of town, there was a craft market starting to pack up as we arrived and the whole area was blocked off for cars around a large fountain. We found our way over to Haynie’s Corner Brewing Company and worked our way up to the bar on what appeared to be a pretty busy day. Once we were settled in, we found a trivia card game and started quizzing each other on random facts. I was wearing my Turks Head Brewing shirt and a guy came up to me and said he’d been there and had never seen anyone else with one of those shirts, so that was fun. About an hour in, we learned why the place was packed, apparently, we’d wandered into an Irish wake of sorts. A friend of the 30 some-odd people at the bar had been killed on a scooter and they were celebrating his life. We were offered a shot with everyone else but that felt a little weird. We cheers’d him with everyone else with our beers. We had noticed that Evansville seemed very bike and scooter friendly, not a lot of helmets, but the roads also didn’t look to be high speed areas.
Our next stop was dinner at Spankey’s Una Pizza Downtown. AI had wanted us to walk nearly a mile away, so we asked the bartender which one she’d go to and she was pretty emphatic that Spankey’s was the better choice. Following her advice, we set out and were not disappointed at all! They primarily do thin crust pizza, not quite St. Louis-style thin, but thin enough to get a cracker crunch. There is apparently a secret option, where you can get it made on the cheese bread too. Miranda got the second one and really liked it.
In the old days, we would have had two or three more breweries in us, but we don’t have that kind of drinking in us anymore, so we headed back to the hotel to watch the Buffalo Sabers game on the bar tv and brought down a tablet to watch the St. Louis City game. One win, and one tie later and it was off to bed!
Sunday
We got started with a big breakfast on Sunday at Comfort by the Cross-Eyed Cricket. There are a couple of Cross-Eyed Cricket locations in town, but this one was just down the street from our hotel. The breakfast was fantastic, and we even had to leave a little behind, which is never great, but it just wasn’t going to make the trip home.
Our next stop brought us to the original reason for the trip, LST-325. LSTs were the brainchild of Winston Churchill, who oversaw three failed landings during his time leading the United Kingdom during two world wars. These ships were designed to sail up on to a beach, discharge its cargo of tanks, trucks, troops, and even rail cars in some examples, and then pull off the beach and do it again. LST-325 is the last one sailing in the original WWII configuration, while a few more of the original 1,051 still actively serve in other configurations. The ship does a yearly one month cruise with a different route each year. Our guide told us that these stops are crazy, with thousands of people visiting each day. The only way to get a personalized tour is to visit it in Evansville.
We toured the main deck that still has its original, although inert, armaments of 30 and 40 mm deck guns. Down below we started in the passenger section, where hundreds of men destined for the beach bunked on the way. The tour then continued down to the tank deck where we got some pictures near the front landing ramp. Our next stop was the mess, then the officers quarters, and the back out on deck. The ship still has two Higgins boats, although they once had a third that was loaned to Clint Eastwood for the filming of Flags of Our Fathers and was mysteriously destroyed during filming. We also learned that the ship served for nearly 30 years in the Greek Navy, and when LST veterans wanted to bring it home, they had to leave with no guarantee that the US Coast Guard would allow them to dock. A crew of thirty 70-year old men crossing the Atlantic in a 50 year old flat bottom boat sounds like a crazy story, there was even a book detailing it for sale in the gift shop.
As we looked through the gift shop, our guide talked us into stopping by the Evansville Wartime Museum on the way home. Evansville provided a great deal to the war effort. Not only did they build 167 LSTs in Evansville, but the Chrysler plant in town also built 6,200 P-47 Thunderbolt fighters. The highlight of the stop though was a flight simulator in the hanger. We all got to take a turn taking off and landing from the Evansville regional airport with varying degrees of success.
Why Evansville? Why not. It was two and a half hours away, had a cool site to see, and had several breweries. While we were there, we discovered a cool gin bar, traveled along an enviable river walk, ended up in the middle of a body building competition that made for great people watching, and learned who should take the yoke if we’re ever on a plane and the pilot is incapacitated. Another weekender in the books!