Heat Index: Summer Guide 2009

Help me Belski!

There are some really great things about technology. E-mail is nice, even though it’s putting the postal service out of business and scraping at the soul of American letters. Here and there I’ve appreciated ordering pizza online. And the curing of dangerous diseases — that’s something we can all get behind.

Technology has also enabled humans to track the weather with Rockefeller-like vigor. Advanced warnings of everything from tree-totaling T-storms to a rainy day are beamed into our homes with world-class graphic treatments and little discrimination. With all those Doppler radars, color-coded cold fronts and academic interpretations of even the most unfathomable weather maps, I feel like I’m riding steed every time a tornado passes over our fair city in the valley. I eagerly await the day a yardstick used to measure snow accumulation becomes the “StormStick 10,000,000.”

Thankfully we laymen (and women) are evolved enough to know that a Louisville summer comes with some guarantees, heat and sticky humidity chief among them. And while we here at LEO Weekly don’t have a mainline to Zeus, we can promise that you’ll want to take a break from all that so-on-and-so-forth — whether it’s a weekend road trip, a hike in the woods or a quick jaunt down a cool Kentucky waterway.

In the following pages you’ll find some recommendations for getting away from it all, the sun notwithstanding. Try to enjoy yourself this summer.