Bye, Bye Birdie!!

July 8, 2012

It’s Day 3 of our American Queen journey on the Ohio River.  Today’s stop is at Henderson, KY, a small, sleepy town on the Ohio.  It’s Sunday, so almost everything is closed.  However, we were able to go to the Audubon Home and Museum.  This is an incredible home located on beautifully landscaped grounds.

Things we learned today:

• Audubon would kill the birds he painted so he could pin them in the positions he wanted.
• Sometimes he would have to kill several birds because the buckshot would destroy their wings or body, and he wouldn’t have an anatomically correct bird specimen to paint.
• There were copper plates and some stone lithographic plates that were used to make prints and lithographs.
• One of the stones that the museum owns was, at first, not considered to be authentic by an auction house, but upon further investigation by the curator of the museum, he found it to definitely be original although it was broken and in two pieces.  The second stone that was whole is in a museum in Cincinnati, and was once thought to be the original.

Because everything else was closed today, our tour was short.  As we got back to the boat, we had some rain that cooled the 100 degree temperatures down into the 80s.  Humid, but much more bearable.

The captain of the boat, Greg Brown,  made an announcement that we would have a lagniappe (Cajun for “something extra”) stop tomorrow at Owensboro, KY.