On the trip up, we saw a number of official Kentucky state highway signs advertising distilleries on the “Kentucky Bourbon Trail” that offer public tours.  L asked me whether I wanted to stop, but at the time I was too worried about getting to the end of the trip to think about taking tours.  On the way back, of course, we saw the same signs and she asked me again if I was interested in taking a tour.  Finally I decided it would be interesting at that, so we turned off I-65 at Bardstown and started down a series of tiny state highways toward the tiny town of Loretto (founded by a convent of Sisters of Loretto), home to the Maker’s Mark distillery.

This turned out to be a serendipitous choice.  Unlike other Kentucky distilleries—for example, Heaven Hill (Henry McKenna, Evan Williams, Old Fitzgerald), Barton (Kentucky Gentleman, Barton’s) or Brown-Forman (Jack Daniel’s, Early Times, Old Forester, Woodford Reserve)—Maker’s Mark only produces one brand of bourbon at their distillery, and not a lot of that.  (Some of the other brands named don’t even meet the legal definition of bourbon—Jack Daniel’s, for example.)  Touring the distillery was something like touring a craft microbrewery, and for much the same reason.  It was commercial, but not industrial.  We went into the brewhouse, were allowed to dabble our hands in twelve-foot-tall cypress vats of bubbling, fermenting mash, watched the 120-proof (60% alcohol) “low wine” pouring into a pair of pot stills for the final distillation before barrelling, stood in a thirty-foot-tall building filled with several thousand barrels of slowly-aging whiskey, watched the bottling line filling and labeling half-gallon bottles as a crew of women hand-dipped each bottle’s neck into pots of hot red wax to seal it.  Along the way, we learned that the distillery takes their old barrels, which may only be used the one time for aging bourbon, disassemble them into hoops and staves, and ship them to a single-malt distillery in Scotland which then reassembles them and uses them for aging Scotch.  This is known as “recycling.”

After the tour, I bought two “Special Edition” half-fifth-size bottles, which I got to dip in a pot of the sealing wax for myself right in the gift shop.  (I drank both once we were home, and L discarded one empty bottle before I could stop her, but I have the other pushed to the back of a top shelf as a souvenir.)  The two bottles worked out to $30 a fifth, which is about what it costs anyhow in liquor stores.  I was pleased to find they weren’t ripping off tourists just ’cos they could.

We wound ourselves back out of the maze of state highways to I-65 and picked up to run for Paducah, trying to get there in time for L to see at least a little of the Museum of the American Quilter’s Society, but the distillery tour had taken too much time from the day and we didn’t reach Paducah until after the museum had closed.  (L says it’s ”good to know” that Paducah is within one VERY long day’s drive of Austin, which means that she has it in mind to so do one day.)

Paducah was an early jumping-off place important to the river trade, situated at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, and its affluent past means it has TONS of beautiful houses and commercial buildings.  The city has restored much of the “Historic Downtown” and continues to work on it.  We decided to stop and look around for a little.

One very impressive feature of downtown is the Wall to Wall Murals, a series of mural paintings executed on the panels of the city’s floodwall telling the history of the town and surrounding area.  I was pleased to see the firm hired to do the work were real muralists rather than sign painters writ big, and the quality of the panels is rather above most civic murals.

L took the wheel when we left, but got turned around and drove several miles out of the way despite my loud and vehement protests that she was going in the wrong direction, a detour that took us around a bigger chunk of West Paducah than I knew could exist.  We did eventually get back to the highway after wasting more than half an hour, but the unscheduled detour threw us even farther behind time than we had been.  We gave up and went to ground for the night at West Memphis, Arkansas.

Thursday was like the last day of almost any big trip we take—tie down the throttle and set the Johnson bar for long-distance running toward home.  L distracted me momentarily at the Citgo station in West Memphis where we filled up, and I drove away without either signing the ticket for my gas or retrieving my card, and didn’t discover it until several hours later and several hundred miles away.  (I must call Citgo soonest about straightening that out.)  We ate a late lunch at the Texas Welcome Center in Texarkana (side note:  why has TxDOT taken to using the modern Spanish flag in the six flags, rather than the old royalist banner of Castile y Léon?), pushed through the Texas back highways regardless, and arrived home about eight in the evening.

Since then we’ve found places for most of the things we brought home.  I’ve started transcribing the genealogical papers, which are an absolute treasure trove of primary source material—family reminiscences by L’s great-aunt written when she was in her sixties and just full of names, places, and dates.  I still have to figure out what I want to do about the long-case clock; some Bright Young Thing cut the AC power cord in two about three inches outside the clock.  In the long run I would like to find SOME kind of proper clockwork movement for it, but until then I may have to compromise with a replacement electric motor of some kind, repugnant as the idea is.

Сказка о золотом петушке.  фнорд.

Sunday was a “didn’t do much, really” day.  T had to leave that morning so she could be at work in Austin on Tuesday, so early in the day we drove over to L’s sister’s house and loaded the pickup with the long-case clock, the trunk, the chain-stitch machines, and a few other things and saw her off.  The afternoon brought us torrential rain as Tropical Storm Barry came to pieces over our heads.  Fortunately, the storms moved south-to-north so T, who was driving west, missed them almost altogether.  In the afternoon L helped her mother go through umpteen boxes of books left over from the Friends of the Jarrattsville Library sale and I worked some more on the new computer.

Monday Kelly and Steve drove up from Catonsville, where they now live, and the four of us went to lunch at a Panera in Lutherville.  (M had a previous invitation to go frog-hunting along with her cousins and Gram, and that sounded a lot more fun to her than hanging round listening to a bunch of boring ol’ grownups talking.)  L’s mother recommended the chicken-strawberry salad with poppy-seed dressing, which L ordered and said was as good as advertised.

Sunday night L and I looked at each other and asked, “Is there any reason we should NOT leave on Tuesday instead of waiting until Wednesday?” The answer was “no,” so Monday after Kelly and Steve left we packed the car, and set out early Tuesday morning.  I voted for taking three days to get home, as I didn’t think I could last through another of those two-day marathon drives.

L has had a particular hankering to see the New River Gorge bridge at Fayetteville, West Virginia.  A false start brought us up at a scenic overlook of the river a few miles short of where we meant to be (but very pretty and worth seeing, nonetheless), but a park ranger set us straight with a good detail map that got us right to the visitors’ center at the bridge—fifteen minutes after it closed.  (It wasn’t his fault; we started too late.)  Nonetheless, L and M climbed down the hundred-and-some steps from the visitors’ center to the river, while I waited above with my knees that would NEVER have made it back up.  We might have stayed and looked longer, but M and I both badly needed to find a restroom, and the only ones at the site were inside the visitors’ center.

Bathroom found at a convenient convenience store a mile or so down the road, we started driving west again and ran into a front working its way east across the mountains, half-drowning us with a pissing-down rain that went on for a couple of hours at varying levels of intense.  Then to confuse the issue, fog began forming in the hollers and creeping down toward the highway.  After a couple of hours of that, and a couple of hours of darkness as well, we hauled up in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, thirty miles or so east of Louisville, about 10:30 PM.

Next morning, after a row with the front desk because the previous occupant of our “no-smoking” room had gone on and smoked in the bathroom ANYway (or a guest of his did), I got a $10 discount off the already-low rate, so the room only cost us $36 plus tax.  (Hotel room rates in Mount Sterling just aren’t as high as in other places, some reason.)  We left Mount Sterling getting on for ten, with the goal of getting to Paducah, Kentucky in time for L to see some of the Museum of the American Quilter’s Society there.

Next:  We tour a distillery, and get lost in Paducah.

The normal school unplugged some saline butter for a color balance.  Fnord.

One day early.  Got in about 19:45 after 10½ hours on the road from West Memphis, Arkansas.

Things we now own that we did not own before the trip began:

• 1995 Toyota T100 pickup; about 150,000 miles on it.  Needs at least a tailpipe before it will pass Texas inspection, possibly more.
• Long-case (“grandmother”) clock with godawful electric works; case built and dial painted by L’s grandfather.
• Two Willcox & Gibbs chain-stitch machines, both with original electric motors:  S/N A680856, mounted on base S/N 24681 and with original W&G foot pedal still attached; S/N A699752, mounted on base S/N 22588 but with no pedal or switch present (maybe never installed).
• Nineteenth-century pressed-tin humpback trunk, mildewed and stinking to the absolute max and full of
• unique genealogical and photographic material from L’s family, much of it primary source material, all also mildewed to the max, and
• incredibly fragile, friable family heirlooms.
• Enormous and expensive limited-edition print, framed and matted, of a wharf owned by L’s great-uncle, with two of the family’s commercial fishing boats tied up to it.
• A set of everyday red-wine glasses.
• L’s mother’s former computer (the Dementor 4400).
• Two 375ml souvenir bottles of special-edition Maker’s Mark bourbon, bought right at the distillery in Loretto, KY and hand-dipped by me in melted wax to seal the caps.

You must bunjee to the replated scanner and paper the buzzard thermals.  Fnord.