Louisville blues

I'm leaving for Louisville day after tomorrow to spend a week doing TOP SECRET work along with a horde of other English teachers and I'm afraid the time has come to face the facts: I loathe Louisville. I realize that it's unfair to hate a place based on a few bad experiences, but that's all I've got to go on. Maybe the coming week will change my mind, but Louisville will have to work pretty hard to counteract my prejudice.

I lived in Kentucky for eight years in the 1980s but visited Louisville only six or seven times. We took our daughter to the zoo there when she was still small enough to be pushed in a stroller, but all my other memories of Louisville are less pleasant. 

I have been lost in Louisville more than once and, on every occasion, I received bad or incoherent directions. 

I got my first traffic ticket in Louisville. 

I have been to traffic court in Louisville. 

In Louisville I found a bug in my salad.

My manual-transmission car stalled and had to be push-started in downtown Louisville during rush hour, with me doing the steering and a female college classmate doing the pushing. Fortunately, she was a softball player and it was a small car. 

That was more than 20 years ago, so perhaps it's time to give Louisville another chance. For a week I'll be sequestered inside conference halls for eight hours a day in Louisville, but I'll have evenings free to explore the city. I'm haunted by the fear that nothing good can happen in Louisville--to me, at least--but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Come on, Louisville: show me your stuff!