This past Christmas instead of giving my sister and I each material gifts, my mom gave us a road trip to anywhere. I used mine yesterday with a day trip to Tennessee!
I have always loved seeing how things are made. I’ve done a few tours and always watched shows on TV explaining processes of how certain things are made. One of the places I have always wanted to tour is the Jack Daniels Distillery. So yesterday Mom and I headed to Lynchburg, Tennessee, to tour the distillery and make a few other stops.
This is before we headed into the museum to sign up for a tour. The great thing about this place is that the tours are FREE!! (Unless you wanted to do the taste-testing tour, and we didn’t care anything about that.) Our tour lasted a little over an hour.
Here we are with “Jack on the Rocks.” This is right outside the underground spring that the distillery uses for their whiskey. I thought it was so neat that they have been using this same spring since Jack Daniels first came to Tennessee to make his whiskey. Our tour guide says it give the whiskey a sweeter taste because of the minerals. I’ll just take her word for that.
This is inside the museum. See the barrel on the right? We learned about the whole process of how they make those barrels and that they use a new barrel every time they make a new batch. Apparently the oak barrels play into the taste, too.
This is a small barrel house on the property that we were able to tour. They have about 80 more six story barrel houses! Our tour guide said that they aren’t insulated or climate controlled and that they just let nature do its thing. The barrels of whiskey sit in that house four to six years–depending on where they are located.
This is the hardware store downtown, and if you can see, it only has Jack Daniels merchandise. This is what I noticed about Lynchburg–it caters to tourists and bikers.
Me and Jack
I got a few comments on my bag yesterday when I posted this picture. You can find it here.
My gorgeous Mom!
After the tour, we went to eat at Miss Mary Bobo’s. She used to own a boarding house and would house inspectors who came to check out the distillery along with businessmen and teachers. The distillery bought the house in the 1980s and turned it into a restaurant. We ate at the 1 o’clock seating. It’s interesting because you eat at a table of 12 and everyone passes dishes around to each other. They had fried chicken, meatloaf, mac and cheese, fried okra, pintos, apples soaked in whiskey, sweet relish, cornbread, and fudge pie. I don’t eat any of that type of food anymore so I felt sick after, but it was good!
Then we drove into Fayetteville to visit Sirs Fabric. If you need fabric from somewhere, this is the place to go! It is definitely worth the drive. The picture below doesn’t even show a third of the store–it’s huge!! Part of my Christmas from my mom is that she is going to help me recover my dining room chairs since Dustin and I bought it off of Craigslist. I had been searching all over looking for fabric, but since I needed about four yards, I wasn’t about to pay $25.00/yard at Hancock or some place like that. The fabric at Sirs is very inexpensive!!! I ended up finding some for $5.99/yard and it was 25% off! We racked up! I’ll do a post of a before and after when my chairs get done.
Mom and I had such a great day and I loved that she gave us road trips as her present to us. I’m already trying to think of what I want to do for my next Christmas present!!
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