What I Did on My Holidays: Part the Lasth

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.