In Nashville, Emily and I were lucky enough to stay with a friend from college (also named Emily) and her family in their BEAUTIFUL home.
On Monday we decided to take a little day trip to Lynchburg and visit the Jack Daniels Distillery. They have a free tour of the grounds.
This was our guide- He wore overalls and talked really fast. All these tours really started giving me flashbacks of my days as a tour guide...
Whiskey is actually clear until it goes through the barrel-aging process.
I wish cameras could capture smells- Every room was filled with a different pungent aroma. This is grain mash in a fermenter. It smelled very yeasty.
Did you know you can buy yourself a barrel of whiskey? It costs 7 to 10 thousand bucks,but if you drink a lot of whiskey it actually works out to 30-35 bucks a bottle. If you buy a barrel, they send you the barrel signed by the master distiller and you get your name on the wall of the distillery as a member of the "single barrel club." Most of the members are liquor stores and Costco stores, but George Strait was on the wall as well...
Walking around the warehouses where they age the barrels was like diving into a shot glass full of whiskey- the smell was overwhelming. Lynchburg is actually in a dry county, so they can't give out whiskey samples (just a glass of lemonade) -but they let us stick our fingers in puddles on leaky barrels...tasty!
Overall, it was a lovely tour- really interesting,and, as you can see, the grounds of the Distillery are really lovely.
On the way back, we decided to drop by Waterfall Farms- a breeder of championship Tennessee Walking Horses. The horses were really beautiful.
Hung like a horse? No kidding.
Labor day weekend there was an article in the New York Times about Tennessee Walking Horses. Apparently, there's a major controversy right now over abusive practices in training the horses. We didn't see anything crazy, but they do put a sort of platform shoe on the horses to train them to lift their hooves high.
Our last stop was in the breeding barn. If you've seen Jackass Number Two (which I obviously did Friday night), then you know what this thing is used for...
The final town we stopped in was lovely Bell Buckle, TN (not to be confused with Belt Buckle). We looked around at a few antique shops with weird shit (including another Mamie doll...), got some freshly-made ice cream and a moon pie.
That night we went out to a hip Nashville bar called Mercy Lounge. As it turned out, Emily (TN) knew the band that was performing, BANG BANG BANG-- I guess a few of them went to high school with her.
It was at Mercy Lounge that I really fell in love with Nashville. After the band played, a DJ started spinning and it became a big dance party. Now, the crowd looked like any hipster crew straight out of Brooklyn. But, NO, they were different. They DANCED. The hipster boys danced! I was in love immediately. And it wasn't any shifting side to side dancing either, it was balls to the wall full on dancing. AND they would dance to everything from Beyonce to Sir Mix-a-lot, they weren't ashamed- AND dance with each other- totally unafraid of being labeled gay, or, hell, even "uncool." Ugh, I love love loved it. New York boys, please take note: Boys dancing unabashedly is a wonderful thing.
1 comment:
sam.. a random posting question.. how do you post more than 5 photos without having to make it a different post? I seem to only be able to do 5 at a time and then blogger is mean to me and cuts me off...
if you don't mind posting the answer on my blog or emailing me (whitney@gazlay.net) that would be awesome!
-Whitney
ps your trip looks like a ton of fun. I love all the food posts you do (I must be a fat-ass Michigander huh?)
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