Jack Daniels!

We woke up at the comfort inn, the cleaning lady came in twice while we were sleeping, once at 8am and once again at 9am, and we were still asleep both times! So annoying, we had gained an hour because we had driven through a time zone so she actually came in at 7 and 8am, which makes it worse!

We went off the beaten track to get to Lynchburg; it took us about an hour to get there. This was real deep America, we saw about 2 cars on the roads on the way. There were farmers out and when we drove past people waved to us and we waved back, there was literally two old people sitting on their porch on rocking chairs, the guy with a piece of straw in his mouth!

We arrived at Lynchburg, it is a tiny town! There are only about 300 people living there, they have 1 set of traffic lights, the other set is about 16 miles down the road. Pulling into the Jack Daniels factory was exciting! Its practically the only thing in town, in fact the main store in town is also the Jack Daniels hardware store that he ran during prohibition. Lynchburg is the odd, because its so small they do not qualify as a city so therefore cant qualify to sell alcohol in the state of Tennessee, therefore Lynchburg is a dry town! They can’t drink what they make!

We had a tour guide name David; here is a photo of him.

He was essentially the stereotype of small town America and he had the strongest accent, we had to concentrate hard to understand him and he loved to be in all the photos! The JD factory was amazing, it is steeped in history, all the Jack Daniels in the world comes from this one factory and it all comes from one spring in the mountain that we were able to see.

Jack Daniels doesn’t have an age because they don’t keep track of how old they are, they simply release it when it taste’s ready; every barrel is tasted by the master distiller. I wont fill you in with too much information about it, its something that you have to do for yourself someday.

The closest you can get to taste is in the section where they filter it through the charcoal, they opened up one of the filters so we could have a smell, it was such a powerful smell, one of the most satisfying smells there is, aging whisky.

During prohibition Jack Daniels had to stop and so he set up a general store in the town, its still there and sells all the memorabilia, and it was really extensive! You could get everything from furniture to sweets.

While we were in the town a stray dog took a liking to us and followed us around, eventually we had to leave it, we named her Huckleberry and she followed us all around town and eventually to our car, as we drove off a group of people thought we were abandoning our dog!

On the drive towards Nashville I fell asleep so there isn’t much to tell. We arrived at our hostel, Music City Hostel, it had parking, which was handy for us, and it was a really nice place, made up of 3 bungalows we managed to have a 4-person room to ourselves. We chilled out for about 3 hours and then headed out to town, it was about 8pm by now. We had dinner, I had a pulled pork sandwich and Paolo had a deep fried catfish sandwich on the balcony of the second floor of a bar on Broadway. The neon lined high street was alive with music, we went from bar to bar having drinks of Jack Daniels in every bar and watching the live music, every bar had live musicians, playing classics to their own music, they were all taking requests and were interacting with the audience. Everybody raved about Nashville being an amazing place, which it is for music, but its quite small, the biggest place to go was Broadway and there were only a handful of bars

QOTD: from David the tour guide, take into account his accent and the fact that he is laughing while saying this.

"Yall think they learnt me ta speak like this!?"