Saturday, June 11, 2016

This morning we toured the Jack Daniels distillery on the sampling tour.  The tour is free if you don't want to sample, but, in Stella's words, "it defeats the purpose to not sample."  And sample we did, five different products, amounting to about a shot.  It's about a two hour tour here.  They show a lot of stuff, where they make the charcoal they use as a filter, the water that comes from a spring, the fermenting stages, the office that Jack Daniels used.  It has the safe that he kicked when it wouldn't open and broke his toe.  He developed gangrene from the toe and that is what eventually killed him in 1911.  He was 5'2" tall and the statues are all life sized.  This tour was much more informative than the one at Wild Turkey.  The guide told us that the first Friday of every month every employee gets a free pint of whiskey.  As she put it, "all 500 employees show up that day and production goes way up."

We then drove to Memphis.  We came on a state highway which was a very good four lane road, but you go through a lot of little towns so it might not be the fastest route.  I was driving when we got here and was tired and really cranky when the GPS unit routed us through a maze of interstates twice with wrong directions on what lane to be on.  It might have been three times.  To make matters and my mood worse, the traffic was so heavy that I couldn't get over to take the exits.   😡😡😡. But we finally found the hotel.  We went to a restaurant in a lively part of town and had dinner.