During this time you can get massive discounts at 55 area attractions, 15 hotels, and 14 restaurants — click HERE for a complete listing. Just show an ID and a friendly Louisville smile and you’ll get all the hot hometown hook-ups.

Pack Your Bags! We’re Staying Home.
Check out a sampling of all that Possibility City has to offer and register to win a fantastic Weekend for Four vacation package valued at $1,000!

• Two nights at Louisville Marriott Downtown
• Four tickets to the Muhammad Ali Center
• Four tickets to the Kentucky Science Center
• Four tickets to Derby Dinner Playhouse
• Four tickets to the Belle of Louisville
• Four tickets to Churchill Downs Fall Meet
• Four tickets to KaLightoscope Christmas at the Galt House Hotel & Suites
• Four tickets to Squire Boone Caverns
• Four tickets to Indiana Caverns
• Four tickets to Marengo Cave (tickets for both Crystal Palace and Dripstone tours)
• Four tickets to Cave Country Canoes
• A $100.00 gift card for Gordon Biersch Restaurant & Brewery

Home Free: The Hometown Quest Scavenger Hunt
Answer tricky questions and solve puzzles at different locations within 60 minutes while taking a tour of downtown Louisville. After completing each part of the tour, you’ll get an official stamp on your card. Once all the spaces are filled, simply turn in your card at the Louisville Visitors Center and get a FREE official Louisville t-shirt. Boom! Like that.

The Hometown Quest begins this Saturday, and ends May 25. Thinkers and adventurers start their tours at the Visitors Center (301 South Fourth Street).

Paint 1,000 Words in 140 Characters
Share your Hometown Tourist pictures with us. Tag our @GoToLouisville twitter account (use the hashtag #HTC13).

Pick a Famous Louisville Face for the Famous Louisville Race
If you don’t live within 20,000 miles of Louisville, or if you live in a small cave in a remote forest on top of a mountain (without access to a homing pigeon), you’ll know that this Saturday, the first weekend of May 2013, Possibility City hosts the 139th racing of the Kentucky Derby.

So we won’t bother you with all the usual stuff about elite horses and cool events and international TV coverage. Rather, we’re inviting you to create your own Derby icon, which you can post to Facebook for all your friends to see . . . and envy.

Just click HERE or on the picture at the top to build your very own Friend of Lou Bobblehead Jockey. Pick from this pantheon of Possibilitators: Muhammad Ali, Thomas Edison, Jennifer Lawrence, Tori Murden, and Rick Pitino.

                 

Louisville Wins Third National Championship

Congratulations, Louisville Cardinals!

Time to update those Facebook photos and make it official: The University of Louisville men’s basketball team is the 2013 NCAA Tournament Champion!

Click on the banner (above left), then . . . oh, heck, you already know how to make this your cover photo. Or snag the poster (above right) and show the world you bleed red. Then go celebrate! (But be safe.)

UofL Community Celebration
Please join the community celebration and ticker tape parade for our Louisville Cardinals. The parade is tentatively scheduled to begin a 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 10, and will run east on Main Street from 9th Street to the KFC Yum! Center. More details will be available here.

Show Your Cardinal Pride
The University of Louisville men’s and women’s basketball teams have headed south for the Final Four, the men to Atlanta, the women to New Orleans. For those of us not making a trip to support the home team, Possibility City will turn Cardinal red to honor the good guys and gals.

While we’re at it, let’s remake Facebook in the image of Card Nation. Click on the photo above and replace it as your cover photo — here’s how — and we’ll show the world what civic pride is all about.

C-A-R-D-S! 
Go, Cards, Go!

You’ve already made us proud, now go make yourselves champs!

A city’s skyline is one of its most attractive attributes.

When Possibility City goes a-wooin’ people around the globe — corporations, professionals, events, investors, and more — letting them know we have a cool waterfront skyline is frequently a deal-maker: it shows we have a robust business environment, a commitment to Downtown, a well-developed infrastructure, an appreciation of architecture, and it makes a statement about our ambition as a city as well as our desire to compete at the highest level with other cities.

MySkyLouisville
From wherever it’s seen, Downtown Louisville’s skyline is unique, inspirational, and personal. In recognition of that creative spirit, we’d like to share a small selection of the many photographs taken here every day. CLICK HERE to visit the site.

Make Your Sky MySky
If you’ve got a camera, send us your favorite shot. The reward? The joy of not only living somewhere awesome, but adding to its beauty.

CLICK HERE to upload your picture of the skyline.

What’s Not to *Like*?
Help us show off our cool city — *like* the site and then share it with others.

Enjoy Some More Shots of Louisville
Speaking of sharing, another place to see the skyline is up in the Crescent Hill / Frankfort Avenue area. And one of the best ways to see it is with friends, good food, and Bourbon.

So we’re pleased to sign off with a quick mention of the New2Lou Bourbon Series, which launches its Bourbon program this Thursday at the Silver Dollar, one of Louisville’s hippest and celebrated new eateries.

How to Say “Louisville” with a Stiff Upper Lip When the world visits Kentucky, it ends up in Louisville — a cosmopolitan city choc-a-bloc with opportunity, culture, diversity, and possibility.

Little wonder, then, that the British Consulate-General in Chicago will take over an office space in the PNC Plaza complex at 4th and Main Streets to re-pre-zent on behalf of our jolly splendid cousins across the Pond (that’s the United Kingdom to you).

This “pop-up-style embassy” takes place from March 11 to March 15, and is being held to reinforce the strong ties Kentucky and Louisville have with Britain. (Did you know Britain is our second largest international customer? We export over $1.5 billion in goods to the UK every year. And that’s a lot of gold sovereigns.)

Of particular note, among many other great attractions, is a Bourbon Versus Scotch Tasting event supported by Greater Louisville International Professionals and Young Professionals Association of Louisville.

For the full agenda, click HERE.

Five More Reasons to Be a Snob About Louisville
Fodor’s is no slouch when it comes to scoring top-notch intell on exotic, international places.

This week they shared “Five Reasons to Visit Louisville Now,” which you can read simply by clicking . . . HERE.

We’re in the Business of Winning 

Under30Media has put Louisville on the list of Top Large Cities for Young Entrepreneurs . . . right alongside Boston, NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco.

But we need to get out the vote so that we make it into the Top Ten. Why? Because the higher our ranking, the more competitive we are when it comes time to present positive stories and honors about how great Louisville is.

Click Twice for the Win
It’s really easy, just two clicks and you’re done — better yet, you don’t have to enter ANY personal information.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE

Once you’ve voted, please share this with friends, colleagues, family, business people, and . . . heck, anyone who’ll listen.

Who’s the App of Your Eye?
Louisville designer Aaron Marshall recently launched his photo app, Over, and it shot straight to the number three feature spot for the iPad App Store.The Over app, which can be purchased for $1.99, allows users to place beautifully designed text on top of photos and share them (just like that one up there on the right).

The app has been a huge success, garnering Marshall and Louisville love from around the country, including a hearty endorsement from the likes of digital media and marketing whiz kid Chris Brogan.

Roses Are Red, Contests Are Cool
Show us how much you adore Louisville by sending us a picture of something you love here. (Bonus points if you use the Over app.) We don’t care what it is — your cat, the skyline, the Toonerville Trolley, your favorite meal at your favorite restaurant — and we’ll select the picture that we think’s the coolest.

The top three pictures will win a sampling of some of Louisville’s best sweet treats. Just click here to upload your photo!

We’ll pick the winners on Monday. Now get out there and get your loving on.

So how does this “upload photos” thing work?
How do I upload my photos?
First, you need to have a Flickr account. It’s very simple. In fact, just CLICK HERE if you want to set one up.

If you’d rather not install Flickr’s tools, you can use their Web form to upload on the upload page. To use the form, look in the navigation menu at the top of the page under “You.”

What the heck is “tagging” and why do I care?
Make sure you add the tags “Louisville” and “Possibility City” to your photo. This helps people search for and find your images.

Tell me about file sizes and file types.
With a free account, you can upload photos up to 10MB in size. That’s plenty big, my friend.

Flickr officially supports JPEGs, non-animated GIFs, and PNGs. You can also upload TIFFs and some other file types, but they’ll automatically be converted to and stored in JPEG format.

The Greatest Two Wheelers in Sports
Later this week, millions of people around the world will be going wild as premier, brightly clothed athletes will be mounting their saddles and gathering at the starting gate for the most spectacular and heralded race of its kind.

It’s cyclo-cross*, the fastest-growing cycling discipline in the country . . . and you can get a Friend of Lou-only sneak peek of the course by clicking here.

International Horsepower
The 2013 UCI World Elite Cyclo-Cross Championships are, for the first time in the international event’s 63-year history, taking place outside Europe. Right here. In Louisville, the City of Possibility.

The races will be held at Eva Bandman Park, 1701 River Road. The program kicks off on Friday, February 1, at 6:30 p.m. with the Elite Rider Presentation at 4th Street Live!

There’ll be two world championship races each day: on February 2, the juniors men’s race will take place at 11 a.m. and the under-23 men’s race is slated to start at 2:30 p.m. On February 3, the elite women’s race will be held at 11 a.m., followed by the elite men’s race at 2:30 p.m.

(If you can’t make it and want to watch [like most of Belgium, where this sport is considered the equivalent of our Triple Crown], it’ll be streamed live for a world-wide audience on USA Cycling’s YouTube channel).

Getting Around the Course Is Almost Impossible. Getting In’s Easy.
General admission tickets are $25; two-day general admission tickets are $40. Children under the age of 10 attend at no cost. Tickets can also be purchased online.

*The World’s Most Vicious Cycle
Cyclo-cross is a high-energy mix of hard bicycle racing and a party, held outdoors in the fall and winter, in all kinds of weather — snow, rain, mud, ice, dust, they don’t care.

Racers compete on a course that includes pavement, wooded trails, grass, steep hills, and obstacles, many of which require a quick dismount, running, and remount. Obstacles can be a long sandpit, a flyover with or without stairs, a run-up with or without steps, barriers, and tight turns.

Not as bad as the intersection of Hurstbourne and Shelbyville roads, perhaps, but well worth watching.

Remember the days when Louisville was awesome? That would be “now.”
Louisville’s a place that embodies all the great things a city’s infrastructure should stand for — wonderful buildings, rich and diverse communities, and a commitment not only to preserving architectural treasures and landmarks, but to building homes, parks, and neighborhoods that serve as bridges from the past to the future.

Lou of Old
We took photographs from the past and added new photographs from the present, at the exact location the original was taken. Almost like a time capsule, but better. Visit Lou of Old to see what we mean.

Louisville’s history is your story
Anyone with some old photos and a camera or a phone can add to the project.

Visit the site, look at the pictures we and others have added, then send in your own. It’s almost as easy as living here.

Life in Louisville. It never gets old.